It has become trendy for even many conservatives to argue that the government should either get out of the "marriage business" entirely, or else to argue that gay "marriage" won't hurt us, and so we shouldn't care about it. Such people do not understand what a fundamental revision of family law will be required to accommodate gay marriage. For example, in my secular job, I work for the state child support agency, and so deal with questions of paternity and marriage regularly. In our current legal system, the law presumes that any child born within a marriage is the child of the married couple -- that presumption can be rebutted with evidence to the contrary, if the husband wish to make that case in court (usually in a divorce), but that is the presumption. When I was born, I did not have a DNA test to prove who my father was, and when my children were born, they did not have a DNA test. We also did not need to go to court to establish that I was the father, because by law, that was presumed to be the case. If you have two lesbians that are married, can we presume that the other woman is the father of the child if their “spouse” has a child? And if they later divorce, and the other spouse wanted to rebut the presumption that they were the parent with DNA (which obviously would not be hard to do), should they be let off the hook when it comes to child support? Does the actual biological father have no rights in such a case? Should such a child have two parents on their birth certificate, or three? These are the kinds of questions that will rewrite our family law if we throw this monkey wrench into the works.
Suppose the government did get out of the "marriage business". Do you really think that in the case of a religiously married couple who live together and raise their children together, but who fail to execute a will, and then one of the spouses dies unexpectedly, the religious spouse should have no unique claim to the property of her husband without having to go through a probate court? Should she have no more claim than his fishing buddy to his car, retirement accounts, or other property? Well, if the government was out of the marriage business, the fishing buddy would have just as much a claim, and the government would be who decided the matter.
And should his children have to have a court order or DNA evidence in order to claim any life insurance or Social Security survivor benefits from a deceased parent? Should they have to have a court order order or DNA evidence to make any inheritance claims?
The fact is that if the government gets out of "the marriage business" it will result in the government becoming more involved in our personal lives rather than less, because the government will have to set up new laws and new mechanisms to deal with issues that we have always dealt with by basic principles of family law that automatically come into play when a man and a woman are married.
The government has no such interests in the case of gay marriage. First of all, the reality of the gay lifestyle is that
they do not generally have relationships that are lifelong and monogamous. They also do not produce children, and so children born during such a marriage could not be presumed to be the children of that couple.
Another thing that most people are not considering is that legal gay marriage will result in homosexuality being taught as normal to your children in school, even very young children.
This has already happened in Massachusetts.
If the people, through their elected representatives wants to set up some mechanism so that when two people share a residence and have common property, that they would not have inheritance problems when one of them dies, they could do so, and they wouldn't have to endorse homosexuality to do it, because sometimes two people who have no romantic involvement may choose to live together for any number of reasons.
But that really is the issue for homosexual activists. They are not so much interested in adopting lifelong monogamy, as they are in forcing society to endorse their lifestyle... and this is born of a deep unhappiness that they have with themselves. And unfortunately, if they get their wish on this issue, and gay marriage becomes the law of the land, they will still be unhappy with themselves, and so will move on to some other attempt to force society to affirm them, in the vain hope that they themselves will feel affirmed and happy.
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