The only marriage you have the right to be concerned about is your own, if any. If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married. It’s that simple.
The whole “traditional marriage” mindset stems from religion. When forced upon others by law it’s just another way to limit individual freedoms. It’s disgusting and has to stop.
I much prefer my position that freedom and fear do not intersect.
=> "You do not have the right to fear the decline of traditional marriage." Particularly relevant if you think, for instance, the gay agenda would be corrosive to your own marriage, due to what I am told is widespread sublimated homosexuality, or the dating life of your children, due to similar reasons. Regardless, I believe telling people that their fear is invalid doesn't tend to be a crowd-pleaser. Instead, I take the more extreme but also I think more defensibly liberal position that their fear is irrelevant, because reducing fear is not a legitimate policy goal of a well-functioning state. A state should reduce the referent of a fear, if such a referent exists.
A state should not engage in sociology - it should not strive to shape the emotions of its citizenry. Such an endeavour is corrosive to the control mechanism of democratic feedback, because it decouples citizens' reaction from reality.
"Any proxy measure that becomes a policy target ceases to be a good proxy measure."
I like your idea that freedom and emotion are orthogonal. A lot of the problem we're having with "culture wars" right now is the blurring of the line between the two. I think separating the two ideas might help solve a lot of issues from "cancel culture" to "war on Christmas" and "safe spaces" and maybe even gun control. You can hate/fear/boycott a comedian who offends you but you aren't owed their head on a platter. It's OK to think that your being a Christian/Vegan/Cosplayer is sacred but you shouldn't expect everyone to cater to your belief.
Things related to substances, sex acts, pornography, religion, obscenity, gambling, even vaping seem to be common victims nowadays.
And when there is some progress in something, it seems that it's not for the right reason (that simply there is no rational basis to restrict some freedom for some arbitrary/subjective concept of "the greater good"), but for the reason that the people that are negatively affected by it became numerous and loud enough to not ignore.
Forcing Steve and Stan to find wives and raise kids is just the 50AD version of "your rights end where the community's ability to survive the next famine begins". Remember, there was a lot more suffering back then so people not being able to marry and live with who you want mostly didn't make the short list of problems these people had.
Of course, over the past 1000yrs things changed. Famine mostly isn't an issue. Modern families don't need to pump out a bunch of kids to ensure they will have enough labor to work the fields when half of them die before age 5. We have ubiquitous written communication so that Steve and Stan can write their wills and their families won't feud over who gets the farm when they both meet an untimely end in an ox drawn cart accident.
So while disallowing homosexual marriage seems nonsensical to us now they were actually optimizing for something 1000yr ago when the legacy code was written (written by people with information that mostly only consisted of what could be observed in a human lifetime no less).
Traditional marriage as in "pegs minus holes = 0" doesn't really make sense as a sticking point in the modern world. "Traditional marriage" as in "for life unless something exceptional happens" is still accepted as the gold standard for child rearing (or all the public health experts and sociologists are wrong). So we definitely shouldn't trivialize marriage and unless something changes we should probably continue to have public policy carrots/sticks that keep child rearing parents together.
I hope that 'public policy' isn't more 'penalize single-parent households' because that is sure not a positive thing. It's part of the problem.
We don't have anything better than a stable marriage for raising kids hence the usage of the phrase "gold standard" since it is the current ideal. Some cultures have more/less community involvement in child rearing than European/Christian cultures and some cultures have marriages of more than two people but pretty much every society (i.e. I can't think of any exceptions) has some sort of marriage system.
>I hope that 'public policy' isn't more 'penalize single-parent households' because that is sure not a positive thing. It's part of the problem.
I agree there's no need to make their life harder
This seems to be a non-sequitur and not based in any historical fact. The only viable "community enforcement method" in that situation would have been excommunication, which would not have solved any problems of famine and probably would have exacerbated them.
Ostracizing them works too. Excommunication is basically the religious equivalent to capital punishment. No need to jump straight to that for petty stuff and first offenses.
> which would not have solved any problems of famine and probably would have exacerbated them.
Deterrence. They wanted people to keep it in the closet and live just like everyone else.
The broader goal of religion is to get everybody to partake in a system of practices that the society knows works (and if you read history you'll see that the definition of "works" expands as societies become richer and more secure). Work hard, have a family, be honest, don't screw your neighbors wife or steal his stuff, and all that other stuff that basically every religion tells people to do. It's basically all about stability and the closer to the edge a society is the less tolerance they're gonna have for things that cause problems and/or deviance from what works.
Curious choice of year, since that's about when emperor Nero married his former (male) slave.
From my amateur reading of history, your theory isn't very well supported; multiple ancient societies had no bans of same-sex couples, which only became widespread later (at least in the West).