One of the most common things I see in regards to the marriage debate has to do with love. Here are a couple common misconceptions I have seen across the internet.
“When a gay couple marries, it is exactly the same as when a heterosexual couple marries. In other words, they are in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together.”
The relationship between the two couples is not the same. Since sexual activity is a huge component of marriage, the two types of marriages are not identical.
Next time you are in a public place, look around and ask yourself: how many of these people got here because of gay sexual activity vs. heterosexual sexual activity? None of the people you will meet, in the past, in the present, or in the future, are here because two men or two women had sex. All or nearly all of them came into being because of men and women having sex (a very few have come into being due to artificial reproductive technology).
This difference between the two couples is so small matter. Consider this: in order for the gay couple to have a child that is biologically attached to one of the partners, they must bring in a third person to contribute the opposite type of DNA needed. So if two gay men wish to have a baby, they must bring in an egg from a woman, and if two women wish to have a baby they must bring in some sperm from a man (notwithstanding other considerations such as who will gestate the baby).
We can see very clearly that based on this argument alone, “marriage equality” as used by the gay community simply does not exist. No matter what legal maneuvers we may take as a society to make it so, it cannot exist, because the sexual components of their relationships are not identical.
Perhaps not coincidentally, gays themselves have a word for this difference. They call heterosexual couples “breeders.” So we can see that by using this term, gays themselves express the precise difference between the two types of couples. This is not a criticism of them using that term; rather, I only wish to point out that it does not appear they are delving into their own arguments and terminology as thoroughly as we might expect. After all, both “marriage equality” and “breeders” are terms coined by the gay crowd, and yet it seems the terms are mutually exclusive.
“Marriage is about LOVE! Certainly you can’t be against love!”
It’s true that marriage is often about love on the private level, between two people. But when we’re talking about making enormous public policy changes that involve millions of people (including children who have no voice) over generations of time, this is a whole other realm and requires us to think in a different way. So there is the private and personal perspective, which is what this question is about, but there is also public policy/sociological perspective. Here’s an analogy between the two.
Imagine the difference between standing next to somebody, and later climbing into an airplane and trying to see that person from 30,000 feet in the air. From the airplane we cannot see the individual person anymore. But we can see the city, and we can try to understand the city as a unique entity with its own influences, forces that act upon it, etc. The perspective of large groups of people and how they behave as a group is also known as sociology. So it is with marriage: it’s important to understand both the personal perspective and the sociological perspective, because they’re different.
Trying to consider a private reason for marriage, such as love, does not work on the large-scale, sociological level. Of course we all can agree that marrying for love is a wonderful reason, but on the sociological level, the state has other reasons for supporting man/woman marriage and for not allowing an expansion of this definition to include people of the same gender. On top of that, it is not practical or proper to expect the state to regulate the private reasons for marriage, as there will be many such reasons, love only being one.
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Read more from this author:
Why Everybody, Including Gays, Should Support Traditional Marriage