Frankly I think the strongest possible argument is “it’s always been this way.” But not everyone is a Burkean conservative – what if that argument holds no sway with you? Here are some more broadly-based arguments.
1. Seriousness. Would you get married on a dare, or as a practical joke? Would you, as a lark, try and break the world record for getting married and divorced the most times in a month? I’m guessing no. But OK, you just met a member of the opposite sex at a party and you are infatuated with each other. Would you get married that night? Why not? What about after two dates? I’m guessing still no, but why?
There are very strong cultural taboos against not taking marriage seriously. And they are strong social consequences for disrespecting those taboos. If I got married and divorced as a practical joke, for a start my mother would never forgive me. For a second pretty much everyone I know would think considerably less of me (if possible 
). I would probably lose friends over it. Thirdly any girl who I did plan on proposing to would be deeply, deeply unimpressed. So even if an individual doesn’t personally think marriage is particularly important, they are still inclined to take it seriously just to fit in with cultural conventions. No, there are no hard-and-fast rules as to exactly how long you should have known someone before you should get married or exactly how confident you need to be that it will last until death do you part, but that does not mean that the taboos are not present. And of course these lines are culturally determined, somewhat arbitrary, and subject to change.
Now suppose that these taboos were to weaken. Suppose it were a widespread practice to get married as soon as you started dating, not taking the long-term nature of marriage seriously at all. Suppose it were a widespread practice to treat the act of getting married as a joke. I’m not really talking about some huge absurd shift – I’m just saying suppose there were a group of people for whom the taboo of seriousness about marriage was fundamentally much weaker. By having many people going around having less serious marriages, it weakens the “seriousness” taboo within society at large. And so marriage becomes a less serious thing for everyone.
And I would suggest that the taboos around marriage are far, far weaker in the homosexual community than in the traditional community, for obvious reasons. Perhaps if gays had always been allowed to get married then the taboos there would be equally strong (although I doubt it, and anyway we have no way of knowing). But the fact is we are where we are in 2008.
The first time I made this argument people said I was being far-fetched. But then I pointed out that this has already happened – with the liberalisation of divorce laws. When divorce laws were liberalised, divorce was thought of as a shocking, shameful thing, that no-one would undergo except in extremes – the reforms were intended to solve the sufferings of a very small percentage of married couples. But by liberalising divorce for those people, it weakened the taboo on divorce for the next group, and so on, and so the taboo on divorce has been hugely weakened, as has the “seriousness” taboo on marriage. Many, many people get married today thinking “Well, if things don’t work out we can get divorced.” This was unthinkable for my grandparents’ generation. Now you may well say that on balance the gains outweigh the losses with respect to divorce liberalisation, and I might well agree. But those losses are very real.
There are no (or trivial) comparable social gains to legalising gay marriage. The pro-argument rests simply on “equality.”
2. Children. A stable, traditional marriage is the best environment for bringing up a child. Yes, some marriages would be bad circumstances for a child and no, not all married couples want children. I do not say that all marriages should have children. I do say though that all children should, as far as possible, be brought up in a stable, loving marriage of one man and one woman. Yes yes I know not everyone agrees on that but that’s another 4864-post thread. Government sanction of a form of marriage which by it’s nature is incapable of childbirth undermines that necessary connection.
3. Encouragement versus toleration. I fully support toleration of homosexuality. But there is a huge difference between toleration and encouragement. For the government to call homosexual relationships “marriage” is to give them an official imprimatur and set them up as equal to traditional marriage. I see no reason whatsoever for the government to endorse homosexuality in this way. Now you may say that for the government to persist in recognising traditional marriage then becomes an endorsement of heterosexuality. And that may possibly be true, but I have no problem at all with that. Minority views and practices should certainly be tolerated (within reason) but society and state is quite at liberty to view them as, essentially, misguided and worthy of discouragement.
4. Social structure. One of the things that makes societies functional is their mixed nature. By that I do not mean that a good society necessarily has lots of different races or religions or whatever. Rather, I mean that if there are lots of different races and religions and so on, it is important that they not be ghettoised. Communities insulated from one another do not understand one another and soon come to regard each other with suspicion and even fear. Regrettably, we sometimes see this with race relations. Fortunately, one of the reasons that sexism has never been as problematic as racism is that, by the nature of our social structure, our genders are very mixed. The powerful rich white man (who the left like to blame for everything) had a wife and daughters, who he wanted the best for. He saw the problems his daughter might have being excluded from a university or being trapped in an abusive marriage or whatever, and he wanted to help her. He listened to his wife talk about politics and thought that she was no more ignorant than his male friends – why then should she be denied the vote? And so on. Whatever inequalities between the sexes may once have existed have tumbled down, not by government imposition or judicial fiat, but willingly, because of the natural community of interest and shared experience of the sexes. This of course has not happened to nearly the same extent with race, because the mythical powerful rich white man had no black friends, relatives or neighbours. He did not meet black people, except perhaps as servants.
Homosexual men do not have wives and daughters, nor do homosexual women have husbands and sons. Legitimising this “gay marriage” is legitimising a balkanisation on gender lines that can only be harmful.
5. Tradition. I am aware that many do not appear to set much stock in tradition per se. But while many different forms of marriage have taken place in different historical societies – polygamous, polyandrous, “celestial marriage,” platonic marriage, etc etc etc – not one society had ever seen fit to recognise homosexual marriage. And so I would respectfully submit that the claims that this is about equality should be treated in that light. “I hereby claim this as my fundamental and ancient right, which no-one, especially myself, had ever asserted as a right before, in the entirety of human history.”
6. “Equality.” More specifically on equality – gay people have, and always had, the absolute right to get married, should they find a partner of the opposite sex willing to marry them. This right is identical to the heterosexual person’s right to get married. The problem, from the gay person’s perspective, is that they don’t value that right, they want a different right – the right to marry someone of the same gender. But we don’t get all the rights we want. We do not have a right that we should take equal benefit in our rights – that would be absurd. All rights benefit some classes of people more than others – for example, property rights benefit people who own lots or property a lot more than they benefit beggars. But that doesn’t (necessarily) make property rights unfair.
So gay people already have equality before the law. Ah yes, say the gay marriage activists, but we have it in form but not in substance. “The real right is to marry the person you love, which you are needlessly constricting.” Oh really? What if you want to be a polygamist? What if you want to marry your sister? And so on. So they retreat again. “What we want is equality for our relationships. Aren’t our relationships equal in worth?”
This is a bridge too far for me. While we accept that, as a matter of fact, people are not equal (they are tall, short, lazy, hard-working, clever, stupid, opinionated, callous, etc), we abstract to an essential humanity, and an equality before the law. But there is no essential “relationshippity” behind a relationship, and relationships are every bit as unequal as people are. My parents were happily married for over 25 years, I don’t give that relationship equal worth with Britney Spears’s 55-hour wedding. Is a gay relationship is “equal in worth” to a normal one? At the very least, no evidence is presented to make the case. I’ve heard it said that whom you love is an essential part of your being. But in fact, considering that whom you love can change over your life, perhaps repeatedly and rapidly, it seems a particularly non-essential part of your being. In addition (and this is what my comment was getting at) we can love lots of people, and not in a sexual way. Friends, family, etc. But if I have a very dear friend I assume you don’t think the government should recognise him/her as a family member. So if I have long-term sex with someone why does that entitle me to make them my spouse? What you seem to be doing is reducing the complex web of human relationships, purely to sex. Which I think is ultimately at the heart of the pro-”gay marriage” position. Some people like to f— people of their own gender, some people like to f—- people of the other gender, and f—ing is the only thing that matters in the world.
But it goes further – because if you do feel like that, then no-one can force you to feel differently. In fact, if you want to call yourself “married” to your gay partner, go right ahead, the government won’t stop you. But this isn’t enough for the gay marriage advocates, because they know full well that lots of people in society at large won’t accept that as a proper marriage. So they want the government to force universal acceptance of their lifestyle. This social engineering is the fundamental driving force behind the pro-gay marriage position, and social engineering is not the job of government.
I know full well that posting this makes me a bigot in many people’s eyes. Oh well. Here’s to reasoned debate.
