It's a very Western idea to unify so totally marriage and sexuality, but they're not always the same. Modern marriages are as much a partnership in money matters and the building of a household as they are about sex. Just because our culture puts so much emphasis on sex does not change what marriages have really been about for thousands of years. Arcaic as it may sound, marriages are about children.

I agree that consenting adults should get to tend to their sexual needs in private. However, marriage and family are big concerns for society; society supports the children of that union (public school, welfare if need be, loans from the government for college) and so has a vested interest in that child so they can repay the favor. Society also has a vested interest in a unified marriage, because two working parents have more assets to support childrearing.

With that in mind, I'm firmly in favor of gay marriage... not because it's so much the sexuality, but because it's about a two-person partnership supporting a child. Yeah, you're swapping the genders out, but two fathers or two mothers can still financially and emotionally support a child.

Once you start getting into taboo forms of sexuality and want to start assigning them the society stamp of marriage, you get into tricky waters. Polygamy, for example. Almost by design (and as the compound demonstrated), polygamy produces more children and more mouths to feed than one full partnership can sustain. That's why they need a whole compound and welfare fraud to maintain it.

Incest is a whole new ball of wax. Yes, maybe there are no strict biological effects in the first generation; what about the third or fourth? And if we marry brothers and sisters, why not fathers and daughters? Mothers and sons? Now we start getting into gray areas of sexual control and child abuse... did the father start hitting on the daughter when she was underage?

The more we try to "privatize" marriage, the more we have to ask uncomfortable and intrusive questions about the nature of the relationship, and the more public it becomes.

Sexuality is private. Marriage is not. You don't have sex in the front of a church, but traditionally, you marry in one. Marriage is a public, society contract that is regulated by the government and by the community; by wanting to make these taboo sexualities more "private" and legal, we are in fact making them more and more public. And especially in cases of incest, polygamy, beastality, etc., if we as a society support them, we are claiming that marriage is NOT a partnership or an institute for the benefit of children, but in fact ONLY about sexual gratification.

So according to you beliefs if a hetro couple who is sterile and can't have kids or a couple who does not want to have kids at all should not get married or have the right to get married because they would not be child rearing to use your words.Since when does the state have the right to make such decisions regarding marriage or any other personal relationship between consenting adults.I seen nothing in the constitution that permits the state to get involved in any way whether it is 'defining' marriage or discriminating on that basis.

The government has the right to regulate marriage because it is a government institution. They give benefits to married couples. They decide inheritance issues and, hell, even in criminal court whether you can disclose incriminating statements made between you and your spouse.

There are some pretty heavy societal benefits to marriage, because marriage (standing up in front of society, or at the government, and officially stating your love) is a public act of love/committment/political intrigue whathaveyou.

Actually, in my perfect world, if people didn't want to have kids or didn't want to adopt (in the case of sterile couples), then fine. But why get tax breaks? Tax breaks are designed to intice couples to have children. So take the tax breaks away from childless couples and give it to good couples raising kids (gay or straight.)

Sexual relationships or romantic relationships are private, and thus not the business of the state. But when you cry for MARRIAGE, you're crying for the State to recognize your union, thus it IS THE STATE'S BUSINESS.

For my part, I can't totally understand why you would marry if you never wanted children if the tax breaks were taken away. Live-in couples have some of the nice fringe benefits of marriage. Look at it this way: if marriage is such an unimportant institution, why get yourself in a twist about the state "discriminating?" If it IS an important institution, then maybe you can admit there's a reason some people would like to discriminate against who is admitted into it.

You are correct that legalisation of polygamy or incest would bring new gray areas to navigate, but doesn't necessarily follow that they cannot be navigated.

Polygamy: What if most or all the wives are sterile? What if the husband is sterile? What if the collective wealth and earning power of the group marriage is sufficient to support everyone and their kids? Why couldn't a law legalizing polygamy impose these conditions on it?

Oh, and what if it's two men wanting to marry one woman, or two men wanting to marry two women as a collective, or . . .

Incest: Possible biological effects can be screened for. In situations where the passing of bad alleles can't be prevented, a sterile state of one or both partners could be required before the licence could be granted. Such screenings could also catch people who are lying about their relationship (said lying could be considered perjury) and psychological screening and counciling could also be required to look for any signs of brainwashing or abuse.

No guarantees that all of these ideas would work. But before you can argue that no

I need more caffeine. . . Anyway, you were saying that these gray areas constituted proof that marriage under these circumstances would by definition be for sex, not the children. But that is not true unless you can prove that these marital risks cannot be compensated for with current law and technology to the same extent as other marital risks.