First, and foremost, there are two ways to view marriage. One is to view it almost exclusively as a simple relationship between two people. It's not immoral to hold that view, but I instead take the second viewpoint which is seeing marriage as a relationship with the main purpose of two people procreating, and raising children to be good members of society. The best environment to do that is a marriage between a man and a woman, and that's the only type of marriage that should be sponsored federally. I'm not saying that it's impossible for gay couples to give birth through unconventional means (surrogate mothers, invitro, etc.), or that we should outlaw gay adoptions, or that it's impossible for gay people to raise children well. However, the easiest and the best environment for children to be raised in is one where they have a mother and a father, and that man-woman marriage is the type that the federal government should be giving full sponsorship to.
That's illogical and both under and over inclusive.
It's illogical because recognition of gay marriage has no effect, positive or negative on the number of children raised by two opposite sex parents. Regardless of whether that environment is the best, and we don't have strong data to say it is, there is no relationship between that and homosexual people getting married. Do you think that taking away people's rights means that there will be an incentive to become straight? Do you think there will be a disincentive for gay people to have kids because the government will be informing them about their inferior parenting abilities through taking away their civil rights? That seems crazy and if you can't answer that question, your whole argument is garbage.
That idea creates an over inclusive definition as well because we allow infertile couples to get married and we don't invalidate their marriages after they become infertile. There's no principled reason to give that right to infertile couples and those who don't intend to procreate, and not give that right to gay couples.
It's also under inclusive from the premise of child environment maximization. We already have thousands of children with same-sex parents. If you think two married parents are better than being an out of wedlock child, why exclude those children from the beneficial arrangement of marriage?
The other thing is that there's no evidence or data here. If you aren't being remotely logical and you have no evidence, you lose 14th Amendment cases which require a showing of "rational basis." This isn't some whacko left wing activism, if it was, SSM wouldn't be winning even among conservative judges. This is just a case where the opponents of SSM can't find a rational basis argument.
At the same time, I realize that gay people can't just wake up one morning and decide that they are straight, and therefore we should give some recognition to the relationship of a gay couple through civil unions, so that they can benefit from things like spousal hospital visitation rights, spousal testimonial rights, adoption tax credits, etc. But because it is not the relationship that is the ideal child-rearing environment, the state does not need to and should not be compelled to give full sponsorship to a gay couple like they should to a man-woman couple.
You're just sort of asserting that I guess. It's totally arbitrary though so it's a worthless argument.
Secondly, the man-woman relationship is deeply rooted in tradition. Not only does every major religion say that man-woman marriage should be the only marriage, but is deeply inserted into society, including today in states where SSM is still illegal, and states willing to keep it illegal should be allowed to do so and preserve the deeply rooted tradition of man-woman marriage.
Each state should be allowed as much time it wants to take a look at the states that allow full gay marriage before deciding it wants to break with tradition and support it. One day, states like Missississippi may allow SSM - however, if they choose to do it, the ones leading the movement should be state legislators and/or state voters, not the federal government or a group of activist judges who have no concern for what the people really want.
Sometimes we don't credit what the people want when what they want is unconstitutional. People in Mississippi might want their state religion to be Christianity, but they can't because that goes against the Constitution.
As for the tradition point, we've changed marital traditions before. We used to have dowry and dower. We used to treat women as basically property of men who were exchanged in a marriage transaction. We used to outlaw interracial marriage. We used to make divorce very difficult. We changed those things and many of those traditional practices are unconstitutional like barring interracial marriage and treating women as property.
