OnLawn Quadrangle

So, noting a number of conversations around the internet where people are honestly discussing marriage and policy around it, I can't help but continuously ask... when we are talking about same-sex marriage, are we talking about:

1. Government Recognition of a homosexual relationship, wedding and living together
2. Making it so that anything unique about the man/woman relationship with each other and the child they potentially have together is not recognized by the government in marriage by neutering “man and woman” from the definition of marriage.

The reason I’d like people to make a better distinction is that I support #1 as a part of recognizing a much larger group of responsible adult mutual support relationships. But there are reasons I don't support #2.

I have a list of tenets of neutering marriage that I just can't accept, and I think accepting them brings about the kind of thinking that promotes bad decisions on the part of the government and people being married. Another tenet of neutering marriage that keeps me from supporting it, as recognized by our own Marty...

Marriage (a malleable creation of the state, as some would have it) matters, but the union Mother and Father (a creation of Nature, from which we all exist) isn’t particularly important…
Gotcha.

In fact, much of it stems from that.

Other tenets might help one conclude that it is okay to abandon a spouse or child who you helped create together because anyone's love is as meaningful to them as yours is. Or one might be encouraged to conclude that abandonment is a good thing for you, that what sexual freedom you may want to engage in is more meaningful than the relationships with said spouse and child. Even worse, that marriage is meant to recognize such sexual freedom, but not the responsibility you have in procreation.