[Elspode]

I know I'm going to be sorry for jumping into this, since OC's research is obviously more thorough than mine (which is to say, none), but...once we've made it illegal for queers to engage in a legally binding contract like marriage, what's to keep us from, say, revoking women's voting rights and anything else that isn't keeping with the fundamentalist notions of how everyone else ought to live?

I cannot conceive of any valid legal argument whereby any two people should not be allowed to unite their assets and obligations in a legal manner, cohabitate, and derive the same benefits as any other two people are entitled to simply by dint of their genders.

Anything else is discrimination. If it isn't, someone needs to tell me why, and the explanation can't include anything about family values (mine might not be yours, and if I'm not hurting anyone else, why should I have to live by yours), historical precedents (go far enough back in history and you'll find a great many alternative lifestyles that were quite acceptable in their time) or {insert your religion here} tenets.

Marriage is a contract. If Bob and Mary want to believe that their contract is sanctified by God, great, cool, I hope they hire me to play at the wedding. But if Bob and Joe just want to ensure that they have rights of property inheritance and insurability...why can't they? If they each married a woman, they'd be entitled to those things, so there wouldn't be any more burden on insurance companies, the government or anything else if Bob and Joe got hitched.

There's no rationale for prohibiting same sex marriage other than religious morality. By my way of thinking, if you can limit one thing on that basis, you can do anything else on that basis, and taken to that extreme, you have radical Islam, Right Wing Christianity, and so on.