Not being religious, I find religious arguments against gay marriage to be empty. But it’s another thing when the arguments are based on biology. Some people argue that marriage is for procreation, so marriages between same-sex couples should be illegal. Obviously, being a good parent is irrelevant since no one is arguing for banning marriages between heterosexual couples who are bad parents, not to mention that all the actual evidence points to no difference between children raised by different-sex parents or same-sex parents.
Such an argument based on biology would suggest that we enact the following measures:
- Ban marriage between same sex couples
- Ban marriage of women past menopause
- Ban marriage of people determined to be sterile
- Dissolve marriages once one of the spouses is too old to be fertile
Mr. and Mrs. Galloway, one couple that espouses this argument, could start the ball rolling by dissolving their marriage. For some reason I don’t think they’ll do it, though, despite having been infertile with no biological children of their own. I wonder how they ignore the cognitive dissonance when they say that they can still be good parents for their adopted children, when all the evidence shows that same-sex couples can be just as good parents for their own adopted children.
Do they imagine a world where reproductive partners are assigned based on some bureaucratic process? They might find this to be a “solid foundation for society”, but I find it rather dystopian. Why else would they think banning gay marriage would help society, when homosexual people wouldn’t be reproducing, anyways? (Or at least they’d reproduce the same way with or without gay marriage.)
To be fair, I’m not saying that people like Mr. and Mrs. Galloway are bigots. Their arguments just suck.