Why do gays need marriage?
(apologies for offending anyone, I'm not trying to troll you into an angry response, I just don't understand why, with civil partnerships, gays need to be married)
As a straight person, I think it's incredibly condescending that we've created this bizarre separate class for gay people. For
ages, I've never had my potential relationship held up to strict scrutiny. Now that gay marriage has come up, people are bending over backwards to define gays out of the things we associate with marriage. If marriage has a reason to exist, it has reason to benefit gays (and society by extension.) If it doesn't, we are still being jerks by not extending the symbolic treatment to dedicated gay couples.
The idea that the highly dedicated gay couples I know -- many who have children -- should be denied equal government recognition because of some abstract normative concept of marriage, or because of vague demographic reasons, is just totally laughable to me. The only things that distinguishes this from anti-miscegenation laws, to me, are uncompelling arguments about biology (not that we straights have ever been judged for marrying without children) and fallacious appeals to tradition.
It's not that gay marriage is a big deal. It's just that it's one of a tiny number of public policy issues where I genuinely believe one side has an obviously superior argument.