So you are saying that had a relationship that resulted in a child with someone they were not attracted to?
If we end no-fault divorce. I am willing to give you SSM. At that point we could say that marriage would have a societal purpose to establish a life-long stable relationship.
Gay men frequently do get married to straight women for many reasons and have sex with them. It happens all the time! Marriage isn't all lovey dovey all the time. Sometimes marriage happens out of confusion, fear, anxiety, social pressure, etc etc.
Marriage honestly as you define it is pretty freaking shortsighted. In certain countries to get married, a wife's family must pay the husbands family to take her off their hands. There are tribes in africa as well as papua new guinea where a man is only married to his wife for procreative purposes and spends most of his recreative sex with other men and young boys. The ancient greeks were the same way seeing true love as only being between a man and a man (and to a lesser extent, a young boy). Women were just there for the nuts andbolts of procreation. Child raising was an affair between men. In the middle east, 50+ year old men marry girls who are 12 and 15 years of age. In india for centuries, they had marriage laws where a woman was expected to throw herself on the burning funeral pyre of her dead husband if her were to pass before here, taking the whole death do you part to an entirely new level. The indian government has gone through hell and back trying to remove those social expectations. We look at practices like that as ass backwards. How do you think the rest of the world sees us with our approach to gay marriage? Or another example, there are people in the middle east trying to stop the marriage of these young girls to these old rich geezers as essentially sex slaves and they are looked at the same way we look at people fighting for gay rights. Marriage is not just the tight narrow picture you paint it to be about man woman love.
What marriage today is in this country is the judeo christian interpretation and even that has undergone much change (outlawing polygamy for example, even though in the old testament and even parts of the new testament it was extremely common to not only have many wives but even mistresses and concubines without it being sin. All of a sudden that has changed without any real biblican backing as to why. What changed was social culture, not the bible).
All I'm trying to get you to see is that what a marriage is is not a fixed, universal idea. Think about what a chair is. Does a chair have to have 4 legs? Does it have to have a seat? Does it have to be made of wood? At some level there is an ideal of a chair which is all you need and the actual chair is probably pretty darn far from the ideal of a chair. I think overall when you look at how marriage has been interpreted across so many cultures over time, you can see that most likely SSM falls well within the real of what is included under the minimalistic platonic ideal of marriage, just like most chairs today fall under the ideal of a chair though are still a far cry from it.
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