Post script:

What does any of the above have to do with gay marriage? As I said previously, many gay couples will choose not to have children. How can arguments about parenting abilities be considered applicable to people who aren't even going to have kids? Why should these couples be prevented from getting married?

The Acolyte Rizla,
At every celebration of marriage of a young couple there is always the expectation they will have from their sexual union - children. That is what being husband and wife means. "I take thee to be my lawfully wedded husband / wife." What is unlawful is to be having sex with someone else any other form of relationship is not unlawful. Symbolic signs of fertility from the union are showered upon them by the guests. The couples I know who do not have children demonstrate unfulfilled human instincts, and insular seflfishness.

Sorry ... this is just getting too seriously weird for me. Deal me out

Philo,

YOU might expect married couples to have children when they tie the knot, but most people do not. Most of us are blessed with sufficient sense of propriety to realise that it's not our business how other people conduct their lives (unless they engage in criminal behaviour, and not having children isn't criminal behaviour - it's not even immoral).

You obviously haven't been to a wedding in a while, because the tradition of throwing rice is long dead. There is a belief that the rice kills birds (supposedly it swells up in their stomach and makes them explode), but it sounds like an urban myth to me. However, it is an indisputable fact that both rice and confetti are right buggers to clean up, so a lot of churches and wedding venues ban them. These days the tradition is to blow soap bubbles at the newlyweds, which are symbolic of precisely bugger all but which look nice and don't need to be vacuumed up after the ceremony.

You're fond of generalisations, aren't you? You do realise that they're frequently inaccurate and best avoided, don't you? Not all humans have an instinct to have children. I certainly don't. It follows that if a couple choose not to have children, they're not necessarily demonstrating 'unfulfilled human instincts' - they may not have the child-rearing instinct which you erroneously ascribe to all of mankind. I put it to you that they simply not fulfilling YOUR instinct to have children - which is fair enough, considering that they are not you. And your narrow-minded and insulting description of such couples as 'selfish' merely serves to demonstrate your intolerance and outright contempt for anybody who does not agree with your beliefs, indicating a level of arrogance bordering on the narcissistic.

And all of this has nowt to do with gay marriage. Do try to stick to the debate at hand - surely it can't be that difficult?

Gays have nought to do with marriage as they are incapable of natural reproductive sex. Their sexual relationships have never in any society been considered marriage.

My wife and I operated a large Function Centre on behalf of our Church that could cater for 350 guests, for the last five years where at least 60 weddings took place. We have attended several weddings of family members, young people at Church and friends recently. All anticipated family or married because they expected family. Most were blessed with prayers for fertility. At least four young marrieds from the Church have had assistance with IVF and one actually works in an IVF laboritory.

Philo,

We have already (8 posts previously) established that:

(1) Marriage is not sexual intercourse or reproduction, nor is marriage dependent on sexual intercourse or reproduction.

(2) Sexual intercourse and reproduction are not marriage, nor are they dependent on marriage.

In short, natural reproductive sex has nowt to do with marriage and vice-versa. So why drag it into the debate?

As for their sexual relationships never having been considered marriage before: so what? Things change, and the argument that 'but this is how we've always done things' is unsound - just because one way of doing things is traditional, it doesn't make it better. I am sure when they outlawed slavery, gave women the vote, ended capital punishment etc., there'd have been people arguing that they shouldn't because nobody had ever done so before. But those people were wrong, because appeals to tradition don't make for sound arguments.

Just because you know some couples who marry with the intention of having children, it does not follow that all couples do. And of course, members of any given Christian denomination do not constitute a representative sample of married couples. I suspect if you examined a more representative sample of newlyweds, you'd find that only some of them (quite possibly a minority) married with the intention of raising a family. There are a plethora of reasons for marrying, and reproduction is only one of them. And it should be noted that any reproduction taking place with IVF assistance is an unnatural form sexual reproduction, and that it is equally unnatural whether it is undergone by heterosexual women or lesbians. Of course, the fact that it is unnatural doesn't make it a bad thing.