Reply #4: A reference [View All]

There is a book entitled "The Knight, the Priest, and the Lady" which concerns the Church's invention of monogamous marriage around the beginning of the second millennium. Before 1000AD, marriage was ill-defined and little more than shacking up, cohabitating, or "jumping the broom". The Church decided that in order to increase their power, they would make a monopoly on what was a "legal marriage", who could marry and who couldn't. This pissed off a number of royals, but by being mostly celibate and pontificating on the sacredness of it, they persevered and ended up winning the day.

Fast forward a thousand years, and now there is a group of people who have been excluded for a long time who now want in on the social benefits. The "deep and fundamental roots" just aren't there. Poor people who had no estates to leave to their children rarely got formally married in a church ceremony; there would be no point to it. Slaves could "jump the broom", but if the master wanted to sell them to different buyers, they had no recourse.

What is in italics in the OP is a romanticized, idealized caricature of marriage; i.e., bullshit. You would do well to point out that the purpose marriage serves to society is to regularize property and inheritance disputes along with identifying a next of kin for emergency notifications and medical decision making. Gay couples need these features just as much as straight couples, even more so, since backwards thinking people can end up being assholes when asked to honor a gay person's will or joint property agreement.

And if this boob is so stuck on procreation, does that make impotent men, women with hysterectomies, and people past reproductive age unfit for marriage?