[FeepingCreature]

"The only marriage you have the right to be concerned about is your own, if any."

=> "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."