Liberals can’t make up their minds whether marriage is a good thing or a bad thing. For decades now people have been downplaying the importance of marriage. It is said that the personal commitment that couples make to one another is what is important, not the legal document that the government issues when they marry. It has become fashionable for couples to live together and produce offspring without the legal ceremony of marriage.
But somehow all that has apparently changed. Homosexual couples insist that the right to legally marry is extremely important to them. If what I read is correct gays and lesbians tend to be socially, if not politically, liberal. Do they not have liberal heterosexual friends or acquaintances who can inform them of the advantages of just living together and the disadvantages of legal marriage? Or do they just want the right to marry so they can then thumb their noses at the same-sex couples who actually enter into a “conventional” marriage?
So, why would a liberal insist that it is not important for a man and woman to marry but that it is important for two men or two women to marry? Simply because they know that social conservatives want the exact opposite. Social conservatives want to maintain conventions and institutions that have worked reasonably well for thousands of years but social liberals want to tear them down. Liberals think they can design better ones; unfortunately their products always require the force of government to work.
It is ironic that getting government involved in the institution of marriage was a liberal act. It was felt that the act should be standardized, legalized and controlled. If it had been left as a cultural or religious act the homosexuals could long ago have set up their own process for marriage. It wouldn’t have been recognized by Baptists, but neither would the homosexuals have had to recognize Baptist marriage.