Quote:
Originally Posted by hip hop bunny hop
Mind, homosexuals are free to engage in private, non-state recognized marriages, throughout the USA. So if it's the term, the symbolism, and the ritual that they're looking for - they've already access to this. What they lack access to is the socially subsidized aspects of marriage, which is reasonable, considering there is no benefit to the subsidizing society as a whole if they transition from dating to married.
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The point of marriage is not to create more children to sustain the state. That idea is ridiculous and horribly Big Brotherish, like straight out of Orson Welles' 1984. Neither is marriage, at least in the psychology of your everyday western world man or woman, something we do because it benefits the state. People generally do it out of commitment to eachother, their love and relationships. If you want to discriminate against gay marriages because they don't produce their own children, you're not discriminating on anything relating to the psychological basis people have for marriage (it will basically seem unfair) and you should also have to start to discriminate against any other relationship where those involved are not able to have children.
Then there's the matter of the triviality of the thing. Gay marriages are not really costly for the state, there are far worse money drains. The state also benefits from having a population which is happy and content and you'd think allowing gay marriage would be a step in that direction. Even when accepting that gay marriages could be a net drain, there are still more things to consider. For example, if both gay members of a couple pay their taxes, their net contribution to society may be positive. Even as married, let's say they give more money to the state than they take. Should their relationship still be discriminated against?
Something ironic in your procreation argument is something you've not yet considered. You have to ask yourself; why there are gay people at all? If you know anything about biology and evolutionary theory, you know there should be a fitness benefit, right? Earlier in this thread, I referred to research which shows that genetic factors that cause gayness in men also cause increased fertility in females and so the presence of "gay genes" in human populations have an overall beneficial effect on reproduction. So, if you want to increase the amount of babies people can make, you should anyways keep the gay genes in the population. What happens is that women are more fertile, but produce the occasional gay sons. From a biological point of view through our evolutionary history, it's obviously been worth it. Otherwise the genetic gay factors would've disappeared through natural selection.