I think that it is worthwhile to acknowledge the legitimate sorts of things that adults taking care of each other might need and that society as a whole might benefit from granting them * even if they were not having a sexual relationship*. IOW, we would not have any problem if secular society essentially made it possible to establish independent monastic communities, even just between two people. If you are willing to do that, then you are going to knock the legs off of all the arguments in favor of “gay marriage”.
When you have established that you’re not hostile to the idea that people other than married couples might have reason to share health insurance, give each other property and inheritance rights, keep up a common household, and so on, it is easier to take the position that defends marriage as an institution that is particular to the unique relationship between heterosexual couples.
Then I have pointed out that it is a bit rich when homosexuals argue that they are being discriminated against for not being given something when they don’t want the same thing to apply to couples who *don’t *have a sexual relationship, which is what happened here in Oregon during one of the debates over civil union! That just proved to me that the whole gay marriage push is in actuality an effort to deny that there any difference between gay sex and straight sex. Once you point out that adults can care for each other for a lifetime and accomplish common goals together for a lifetime without ever having sex with each other, while sexual partners can have sex with the express intention of never seeing each other again, that is a mighty thick pair of blinders to pretend to wear.
If a person claims that they cannot differentiate in any meaningful way between gay sex and straight sex, then trust me, that person is going to be very hard-pressed to say why on earth society at large has any interest at all in whether or not couples have a sexual relationship or not. If sex is totally divorced from the remotest possibility of mutual fecundity–remember, even from a secular view, a couple doesn’t have to have sex with each other in order to employ a surrogate or to have one of them inseminated by someone else!–then sex becomes an entirely private matter. There is really no getting around that. Take the possibility of reproduction out of the definition of marriage, and there is no reason sex needs to be part of the definition, either. Civil society doesn’t have the least bit of a dog in that fight, not if it means* excluding* people who are taking care of each other but choose not to have a sexual relationship. That would be discriminatory.
On that account, I think it would be the best if any definition of marriage that doesn’t have the possibility of reproduction as its raison d’être must also be pushed to its logical end, which is to take sex out of the definition entirely. If a lifelong mutual commitment to one’s biological family is not the reason for marriage, it would be unnecessarily prejudicial to involve sex at all, because marriage would become an institution of mutual care. Mutual care does not require sex. Therefore, either marriage ought to be heterosexual, or else civil marriage ought not be sexual at all. In that case, it seems reasonable to call it what it is, which is a civil union or a domestic partnership.
That may be the way we are forced to go: That is, to accept that civil society might substitute legal contracts that have nothing to do with fecundity for the concept of marriage. As long as society doesn’t enshrine obvious logical fallacies into law, such as a definition of “marriage” that recognizes none of the obvious differences between gays and straights, it may be that this cannot be helped.
