Some people have asked for secular reasons to oppose gay marriage. Not all relationships are equal in the eyes of the state. For example, my relationship with my guinea pigs may be important to me, but the state could care less. Why? Animals don’t pay taxes or contribute anything to the maintenance of the state other than giving me personal happiness. Platonic friendships are also not important for the same reason. The state does care about the continuation of the nation via the creation of new citizens to form a new tax base, become workers, and serve in the army. The only way to do this is to through immigration or for native-born citizens to have children. Until recently, it was understood that a stable two-parent opposite sex home was the best environment to raise children. The state also has an interest in fostering this kind of environment to prevent anti-social behavior on the part of the children in question. Communities in which stable traditional families are lacking tend to be prone to crime.
The question has also been asked of, “How will same-sex marriage affect my heterosexual relationship?” The answer is societal, rather than individual. Once non-procreative relationships are valued to the same extent as traditional marriage, there is less of an impetus to get married; it’s just one “lifestyle choice” out of many to choose from. This in turn leads to a downturn in births, a shrinking tax base, a labor shortage, and a breakdown in community.
This was prefigured by the societal acceptance of cohabitation. Once that was seen as normal, there was no reason to oppose same-sex marriage. For example, in low-income black areas, traditional marriage is almost non-existent and one man having babies with lots of different women is the norm. Because this is the norm, children are raised to think that this is an acceptable state of affairs and affects all relationships in that area. It’s the same way with same-sex marriage. Since the law has a pedagogical effect, the state of California is saying that same-sex marriage it’s just one good choice out of many.
Also, the analogy between inter-racial marriage and same-sex marriage is specious. If we look at any definition of marriage during the period of Jim Crow (c. 1880 - 1966), race is not going to be mentioned. For example, the definition of an old dictionary I have (I can’t be more specific, the cover and some of the first few pages are missing, but I do know that it’s at least 40 years old) says that it is, “1. a. the state of being married b. the mutual relationship whereby men and women are joined in a special kind of social and legal dependence for the purpose of maintaining a family. 2. the act of marrying or the rite by which the married status is effected…” Note that this definition does not mention whether the man and woman in question were of the same or different races. This is because the race of spouses is not important to the fundemental definition of marriage, whereas the sex of the participants is. Similarly, the 1891 (not a banner year for race relations) edition of the Baltimore Catechism defines the sacrament of Matrimony as, “the sacrament which unites a Christian man and Christian woman in lawful marriage.” It did not say a “sacrament that unites an Irishman or Irishwoman” or a “sacrament that unites a Chinese man and Chinese woman.” The race of the spouse is a matter of preference, not a essential to the sacrament or the definition of marriage as such.
The point of banning inter-racial marriage in some states (it was not a universal phenomenon in the US, and mostly in the South) was to dehumanize blacks and other similarly disenfranchised groups. No segregationist or black nationalist claimed to be “defending marriage” by opposing inter-racial marriage, although they did claim to defend white/black womanhood. Inter-racial marriage is essentially “in-group out-group marriage” sort of like a Norman marrying an Anglo-Saxon during the Middle Ages.
