Your third paragraph is spot-on; gay marriage can only strengthen marriage as an institution. (Unless one somehow takes comfort in being in an elite 90%, which would just be sad.) To the extent that marriage strengthens society - and I think it does that considerably - gay marriage will also strengthen society. Especially American society, which is being pulled apart by many factors. The more factors that bind our heterogeneous parts into one homogeneous whole, the better. United we stand . . .
His premise is simply that marriage is a social construct designed to control procreation, not that it has ever been a prerequisite for procreation or limited to procreation. It's a valid point. My problems with it are that marriage has never been SOLELY about controlling procreation - binding together families and society has always been a major part of marriage - and that just as marriage has evolved in the past, so it must continue to evolve with our society. We have allowed homosexuality to become open and fairly mainstream, which is good, a natural extension of traditional Western liberalism. It must now become fully mainstream, with all the rights of heterosexuality, or it is a dividing agent we do not need.
Agreed, and beautifully said. I believe that yours is truly the most universal and fundamental definition of marriage, not the various ends to which families and secular and clerical power have used it. With the understanding of course that marriage has not always followed that definition. But with the exception of outliers like medieval nobility (who denied that romantic love can be or even should be within the bounds of marriage), the goal even of arranged marriage was that the man and woman would grow to love each other. Marriage as a modern institution is all about that love, and there is no excuse for artificially limiting that to heterosexuals.
