First, opposing gay marriage is not the same as discriminating against homosexuals. Whatever your thoughts on gay marriage, it's important to look beyond the idea that everyone on the other side is either a hate-mongering fundamentalist fanatic or, conversely, a pervert bent on destroying Western Civilization. You can oppose gay marriage without hating gay people. You can be for gay marriage without being sinful.Gays, of course, deserve all the protections any US citizen is promised by the Constitution. But the legal and social benefits of marriage are clearly not "rights" as the Constitution describes them. They are extra benefits our society awards married couples for largely symbolic reasons. That is, American society rewards marriage because we have, thus far, found the one-man/one-woman nuclear family the most socially useful.
Certainly, gay couples can be a socially productive as straight ones. However, gay couples cannot, by definition procreate. (That isn't to say that gay couples don't make wonderful parents. Many do. Mostly likely, the percentage of gay people who make good parents is exactly the same as the percentage of straights who do-- very, very low.)
But taking procreation out of the equation does, like it or not, change the meaning of marriage. Society will essentially be rewarding couplehood, rather than parenthood. That is, we will not be rewarding the family unit, but the romantic ideal of marriage; the idea of two people bound by sexual love in what our therapeutic culture likes to call "a relationship." Which is fine, if that's what we collectively decide.
But ultimately the question becomes why couples of any sexual orientation deserve more rights than singles? Single people like to adopt kids, too. Single people like to share their health insurance and pensions with loved ones. If we give all the benefits of marriage to any two people that love each other, regardless of gender, why should we only reward sexual love?
Suppose that two lifelong friends, older men, want to formalize a domestic partnership to save money on food, housing and medication. Society has no good cause to deny them. Does a sexual relationship between two men deserve more social sanction than a nonsexual one? If so, why? And what does that say about us?
We don't have all the answers. (Today.) But at least we are thinking hard about the questions without a bunch of name-calling. It would be nice if the country as a whole could do a bit more of that.
