Needless to say, virtually no one in America actually understands the context "Michael S." elucidates:
The "gay marriage" issue can be understood as a consequence of the redefinition of marriage under a regime of income taxation, the welfare state, and private sector tax-incentivized non-cash employee benefits. This originally took place without the slightest consideration of homosexual relationships.
For most of its history marriage was an institution intended to provide stable conditions for the rearing of children and orderly procedures for transfer from parents to children of marital estates at the time of death of one of the spouses, with an appropriate provision for support of the surviving spouse through dower or curtesy. Homosexual relationships being sterile by definition, marriage had nothing to do with them. Even in societies that did not stigmatize homosexuality in the way Judeo-Christianity does, there was never any historical instance of "gay marriage." Harmodius did not marry Aristogeiton; Hadrian did not marry Antinous. Such a thought would have been risible to them, as well as to the rest of the society in which they lived.
Relatively recent legal and economic changes have tacked onto marriage certain aspects of which it never partook in the past. Spousal and family insurance benefits, tax advantages (in some cases) to being considered as a couple rather than as two individuals, etc., now indeed may outweigh in their economic importance the traditional legal consequences of marriage. Dower and curtesy, primogeniture vs. gavelkind, etc., all were more significant in a time when most deaths were intestate. Today most people with enough assets to worry about take care of such concerns via prenuptial agreements, wills, and trusts. Given all this it does not seem surprising that people in homosexual relationships want to climb aboard the insurance and welfare benefits-driven gravy train that marriage has become for heterosexual couples.
Marriage is a touchy issue because it is a nexus of civil society, religion, and the legal imprimatur of government. Most people are happy with the former two remaining as they are, whereas those that are not happy with them want to use the last of them to force a change in the others. Add to the mix the Frankfurt-school objective of demolishing the patriarchal family as a prerequisite to the total rebuilding of society. See, for example, Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization." I suspect it is more due to the influence of the Frankfurt school than we credit that "gay marriage" has become so significant as a focus of cultural warfare.
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