Hey, the original parent poster: (I figure I'd weigh in)
I'm not strongly against gay marriage. I simply don't support it. Sorry if my explanation is a little disjointed. There isn't one particular issue that explains it all.
I see the whole issue as completely artificial. It was almost entirely created and started by Gavin Newsom (former mayor of SF). It was a demogogic move on his part to try to get support for his run for governor several years later.
Aside: Ironic it backfired and ended up pigeon holeing him as a far left politician.
No one talked about or wanted gay marriage before he brought it up.
A more nebulous reason is that society is moving away from marriage. People are more and more living in civil unions. Marriage has become a religious/traditional thing. So revising/redefining antiquated traditions to appease a group of people seems unnecessary.
I think the idea of redefining a term like marriage is also rather problematic for me. It's always described a union between a man and a woman, since like the times of Hammurabi - and now we're just redefining it? It seems a little absurd.
The address the issue, we created a new term. "Civil Unions". But for some reason this isn't good enough - and I don't know why. Seems like the real goal is to redefine a several thousand year old term - which kinda seems revisionist to me.
Another argument I've seen and that I've never seen addressed is: why do gay couples get to marry and not polyamorous people? Seems like there is a double standard here.I personally feel like if they're going to go through all of this, they might as well allow all marriage.
At the end of the day I wouldn't really care if gay marriage passed. What bothers me the most is that so much time, effort and money is spent on something that is a rather insignificant issue.
The right to visit loved ones at a hospital and the tax benefits are more symptomatic of broken hospital/tax laws than a huge national issue on par with the civil rights movement. I think calling gay marriage a civil rights issue is hyperbolic and disingenuous (and is polyamorous marriage a civil rights issue too?). I think there are way way way more important issues currently to deal. Thousands of people are rotting in jails for non violent crimes, thousands of people have their lives ruined by medical bills, thousands of people are forced into plea bargains for crimes they never committed. There is so much suffering happening around us, and we spend out time arguing about redefining marriage. It's just really frustrating for me to see this artificial debate occupy so much of the collective unconscious of the country (and now the world).