Just because Scalia’s predictions have not come true does not mean they should be dismissed. Logically, if the minimum standard for sexuality laws and thus marriage is “consenting adults” then there is no reason incest and polygamy should be illegal. This has been discussed on Slate before and there is no reason why incest or bigamy should be any less morally repugnant or illegal than being gay if they are consenting adults.

Actually, I think the end game is way past that even. Once you totally divorce marriage from children, the next thing is to completely divorce it from sexuality. After all, if marriage is merely a relationship of convenience between consenting adults, why does this necessarily have anything to do with sex? If you want to marry your brother or your mother so that they can get on to your health insurance plan, why shouldn't you? Why should have to have sex with them to be married? Eventually, the definition of marriage will be any relationship that two or more people decide to call marriage. And once marriage becomes everything, it becomes nothing.

Some people throw the "if marriage becomes everything, then eventually it'll become nothing" argument into the fray as if people committing to love and support each other within a legal framework is more akin to owning an iPhone than a significant life choice. "Oh, jeez, now that iPhones cost $200, *anyone* can get one... they're so not cool anymore!"

On the other hand, no one says "Well, anyone can get a job, so all of a sudden having a job just doesn't seem that special or important to me!" Or car insurance or having kids or eating lobster...

And if conservatives are unhappy with the divorcing of marriage from childrearing, they should direct their ire at The Pill, not gays. Fortunately The Pill (and gays) are here to stay. Heck, men may get their own Pill sometime soon "Trust me, baby, I'm on the pill..." LOL

Right now, getting a job pretty much means you do work and get paid for it. If we redefined a job as "doing anything that you feel like whenever you want to" then having a job wouldn't mean anything.

Arashi, what do you think is the essential societal purpose of marriage? Suppose a non-married person said, "Marriage is inherently discriminatory against single people and should not be a legally recognized relationship." If you wanted to defend marriage, what you tell that person about the necessity for the state to recognize marriage?

"what do you think is the essential societal purpose of marriage?" Depends on what definition of marriage you use. If its the secular state licensing definition, it essentially creates a new economic unit between 2 people. Love and commitment are not required. Just 2 people over a certain age signing a piece of paper in a court house. Once signed, the married couple get tax benefits, insurance benefits, hospital visitation rights, a vesting of community or marital property rights, etc. Upon its dissolution, the state imposes certain requirements for divorce and may impose spousal maintanence (alimony) requirement upon one of the members of the marital community. If its the religous definition of marriage, then typically you promise to love, respect, and be faithful to one another. You may also have to promise to raise your children in the same religion and the religion may impose restrictions on ending the marriage. The state requires none of this. If you don't want gay folks to get married in your church-fine. But the state laws on marriage have nothing to do with morality.

I recently heard this personal story from a fellow student: she lives with her boyfriend (whom she calls her fiance and whom she plans to marry) and every year, they go to his company to declare themselves to still be domestic partners. Because they have a domestic partnership, their living together allows his company to provide her the benefit of his health insurance. Her financial aid as a student is not threatened. The catch to all of this - and I see the gay activist sticky fingers all over this - is that the only reason they can be in a domestic partnership in Massachusetts and claim the benefits is that the company has branches outside of Massachusetts. Lo and behold, if you are dealing only with Massachusetts, it has to be marriage - because, I am sure of this, domestic partnerships were discarded and deemed as inferior by the gay old wedding planners in legislature!

If I'm a single person, I should be able to set up a partnership with whomever I want and call it a domestic partnership. Perhaps with someone even outside my species, although that may be pushing the envelope, don't 'ya think? Leave marriage alone...

setting up a domestic partnership with something (not someone) outside your species is not 'pushing the envelope'; it is and forever will be impossible. Mutual consent is always required in a contract, and always will be.

Who is the judge of whether marriage is sexual or not. Why couldn't any age person be married? It must be about sex to some degree because contracts can be made at any age.

I think what I find instersting is a small snipit of what KevClark64 had to say and that is, "if you call marriage . . ." What I find useful to contribute to the thought chain is that the word marriage, as all other words in language, was arbitrarily assigned to describe a concept of interaction between two people so that we could use the same sound utterance and convey the same general meaning from one individual to another, and in that sense we "standardized" it's meaning. We litterly could substitute any other word, and as long as we all agreed that it generally meant the same concept as it does today, we could use that word.

What that says to me is that marriage as a word was imbued with all the subsequent lofty attributes by like-minded individuals to describe a concept that they similarly connected the same subsequent lofty attributes. And so in that sense they "standardized" it's meaning.

To me that does not mean that the word "marriage" is then inherently exclusive to one group of people, or MUST be characterized specifically by the same subsequent lofty attributes, or that it is even ordained by God. It's simply a word used by people to explain an idea in their own mind to another person. How then can my getting "married" to another man be in any way demeaning to anyone else's marriage since their marriage is a concept that they alone hold?

kroert16, I'm not exactly sure what your point is. Words are the way that we convey ideas. They are not merely sounds that have no meaning. Marriage does have meaning. If it were merely a word, then why would anyone care about it?

Kevin Clark