> instead of changing the tax code to be more specific (change the marriage tax benefits to child-rearing benefits)
That's actually closer to what I'd consider preferable, which would be no changes to existing marriage rights, but a federal civil union statute with marriage-level financial benefits contingent upon child-rearing. But such a thing would never be taken seriously on either side of the political crevasse - far too much for conservatives, far too little for progressives, thus decried from both sides. Is it too soon to bemoan the equation of nuance with assault in the modern American political environment?
> deny one of humanity's oldest and most important rituals [...] to an entire group of people
An entire group of people who have never in Western history, perhaps not even in human history overall, had access to that ritual, until the Supreme Court last year discovered in the Constitution a right heretofore unknown. It is very hard to overstate the extent to which this represents an upheaval of tradition, and such things don't happen in a vacuum - or, utopianism notwithstanding, without consequence. Being myself a member of that roughly one percent of the population which has been led to believe it may enforce its will upon the whole without fear of backlash, I don't think it is too hard to imagine what kind of "gut feeling" there might be somewhere in the back of my mind as I speak on this subject, as I've so often done over the last few years.
It's possible my analysis lacks accuracy, although that's yet to be demonstrated, and falling back on insinuations of bigotry doesn't really indicate confidence in one's arguments. But if you want to know what motivates me to concern myself with the subject in the first place, you need look no further than fear. I don't want to find myself in a war, and I really don't want to find myself in a war my side is all but guaranteed to lose - and one in a hundred isn't the kind of proportion that's conducive to a win. But some people seem to want to start one, and to put me and mine in it. They say it's for our benefit, but I've been observing and comparing their claims and their actions for some decades now, and I think they are lying. I also see no reason to expect that, when all the heavy things they've so blithely flung into the air start coming down on people's heads, they'll feel any need to stick around and share the horror they've let us in for. That seems to me like an outcome toward which it's eminently reasonable to look with trepidation.
We'd got by this long without being able to marry. We could've been satisfied with Lawrence v. Texas, which is an amazing accomplishment in its own right, and given it another generation or two before we told the rest of America again that it could take its morality and shove it even further this time. No, that's not ideal, but what is? Nobody ever promised us, or anyone else, an easy life. Nobody ever promised us a just world, by our lights or anyone else's. And the whole concept of progressivism revolves around gradualism, or so I'd been given to understand - the idea, I gather, being that of modifying morality over successive generations by a process mainly centered on education and subtle social pressure, rather than forcible reengineering of whole swaths of society at a time. Quibble though I may with the nature of such a process and the purposes to which it might be put, I at least have to admit that it has a reasonable chance of working. Trying to do everything in the space of half a generation like this is liable to get a hell of a lot of us killed, and to leave those who aren't worse off than they were at the start. I guess that's easy to contemplate for people who don't stand to suffer as a result of it. Here on what's liable to be the pointy end, maybe not so much.