>>The union of a man and a woman results in children. Marriage secures the well being of husband/wife, father/mother and that of the children.<<

Sometimes: a lot of people take precautions against that sort of thing - myself included. Some of those people choose to get vasectomies - myself excluded. And we still let those vasectomied men get 'married' even though it is known prior to the 'marriage' that one of the parties is infertile so the 'marriage' cannot produce issue. Imagine that: two people getting 'married' just because they love each other and not because they want to rear any offspring. These people who want to change the very foundations of our society need to find a new word for these infertile 'marriages'.

Cheers,

Tony

Kolasinki's argument (below) criticizing the analogy between gay marriage and interracial marriage is what fails:

As Adam Kolasinski writesin The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage, “Some have compared the prohibition of homosexual marriage to the prohibition of interracial marriage. This analogy fails because fertility does not depend on race, making race irrelevant to the state’s interest in marriage. By contrast, homosexuality is highly relevant because it precludes procreation.”

Sexual reproduction is one of many functions of marriage. To argue that sexual reproduction is the primary or the only criteria upon which to judge the recognition of a union overlooks the many other functions that marriage as a cultural institution performs. The absurdity of Kolasinski's position is such that applying his criteria would lead us to deny the legal relationship between members of a blended family (that is, when two divorced individuals, one or both of whom has children from a previous marriage, marry and form a new family). If we make biological relatedness the primary or the sole criteria for assigning social status and legal rights, we must deny that the children of a blended family have any legal relationship to their step-siblings or step-parent. Similarly, if potential sexual reproduction between partners is the criteria for deeming the validity of a union, we must deny marriage rights to infertile couples, because they are physically incapable of sexual reproduction.

What Kolisinski has done is attempt to disguise a rejection of homosexuality in scientific language that turns marriage into a natural, rather than a cultural institution. It is an utter failure of logic to use sexual reproduction as a criteria for recognizing marriage, unless we are in favour of denying the right to marriage to infertile couples, and denying legal recognition to step-families.

Houellebecq (2.19:44pm, 27/9),

Given that “marriage” is a “social construct” and there is a lobby busily trying to remove the “opposite sex’ part from the “social construct”, there is of course a move to remove the “two”. Mostly, this is a prelude to a “three” or a “four”, but we really ought to think about the rights of single people and let in a “one”. Just as your human right as a father to be called a mother is currently denied by matriphobes or patriphobes or both, the right of single people to marry themselves is denied by uniphobes. Let us just abolish the word “relationship” and replace it with “marriage”