[throwaway0a5e]

Religion is basically just the public policy of 1000+yr ago. If you look at the economics and societal mechanics of subsistence farming societies it's pretty clear why homosexual marriage throws a wrench into all the various mechanisms (inheritance, training the next generation in the skills they will need) that keep things moving from generation to generation and increases risk by reducing the future labor supply (kids). Disallowing homosexuality screws ~10% of the population but over the course of multiple generations and with the slim margins that agrarian societies exist on forcing that 10% of the population to find a heterosexual partner and raise a family and act like everyone else may very well be enough of a boost to keep your community intact when the next 50yr drought hits.

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.

[cycloptic]

>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.

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.

[throwaway0a5e]

>The only viable "community enforcement method" in that situation would have been excommunication,

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.

[JoeAltmaier]

'Traditional marriage' is the standard, sure, but maybe not 'gold'? Plenty wrong with many families today.

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.

[throwaway0a5e]

>sure, but maybe not 'gold'? Plenty wrong with many families today.

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

[icebraining]

> 50AD

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).

[throwaway0a5e]

Meant to say 500AD, much darker time to live in the kinds of places the ancestors of most people here come from.