Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your news letter. 
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- Edit 1Before modification by Joel at 18/01/2010 07:50:05 AM
It forces them to treat same-sex unions as existent, just like heterosexual marriages, and that's it.
And how is that different from what I described? Since they do not actually exist, a law like this forces people to grant privileges to a novelty institution.Existence and legitimacy are separate characteristics. Human beings have the mental capacity to make their own judgments of legitimacy, regardless of what the law says.
Many of the devout religious view any "civil" marriage, i.e. a union that was not sanctified by a church, as illegitimate, but that's their religious preference and not something they get to legislate via the government.
So? That's a normal & commonly accepted practice. Same-sex marriage is both pointless and groundless. It has no history of long use or genuine place in society. It is a special privilege invented for the benefit of the few, and attempts to legally ratify it are attempts to force every one to conform to their view. It is no different than attempting to govern according to the Bible.I'm not talking about social norms (or what you consider to be social norms), I'm talking about legislation and government. These are not synonymous, nor even close to it.
Your appeals to history, usefulness, place in society, etc. are all hallmarks of conventional moral reasoning. Treating social institutions as ends unto themselves, rather than human constructs able to be changed and improved, is fallacious. The same arguments you make could be applied to inter-racial and inter-faith marriages as well, and in fact were until fairly recently, historically speaking.
The only reason you view gay marriage as a "special privilege" is because your concept of marriage is limited. You think of it as an institution uniting, specifically, a man and a woman, ideally to have children, raise a family, and perpetuate existing societal norms. The principled stance on marriage, in contrast to the conventional one, is that it is the legal joining of two people who are committed to each other. (In my opinion, even the restriction of "two" can be questioned.)
Legislation and government, at least in a principled democracy as America is supposed to have, isn't about reinforcing social norms; it's about providing citizens with equal rights and protections, and allowing them equal voices to shape their communities.
As far as "the benefit of the few": in what objectionable way do you believe that legalizing gay marriage would actually privilege the minority group of homosexuals above the rest of the country? What special advantages would they gain that others lack? I just don't see it.
Also, your attempt to justify governing with religious preference through free-market rhetoric is just pathetic.
Your utter lack of any answer to that is worse. What religious preference was I suggesting? I am one of those people who view civil marriage as irrelevant and meaningless. I am not attempting to impose my views on anyone. If people want to claim they are married because they have a piece of paper, that is fine with me. On the other hand, same-sex marriage legislation would force other people to accept their position. THEY are the ones governing with their preference.You have no real principle to back your position, it is simply your ox that is being gored, so that determines what side you are one.
You may view civil marriage as irrelevant and meaningless, but if you owned a business you would still have to give your employees' civilly-married spouses health insurance. That's "forcing" you to acknowledge their marriage just as much as legalized gay marriage would be.
The religious preference you suggest is discrimination based on sexual orientation, which has almost exclusively religious roots.
For once, I read a response before duplicating it (I had to make sure that penultimate paragraph was there, because it makes everything he said after, "You are not wrong about your distinction between civil & religious weddings" irrelevant. Churches don't have to sanction civil marriages (many don't) but an employer creating a distinction between civil and religious marriages that doesn't exist in law (ultimately, religious marriage itself doesn't exist in US law, can't) is begging for a murderous discrimination suit. Whatever the spouses orientation.