[aNoob7000]

You asked, why this minority? Because two consenting adults want to get married, that's why. Not two children, but two adult Americans want to get married and have it recognized around the United States, not just a few states.

States screwed up when they took the civil part of marriage and associated it with the ceremonial part in a church.

[rqebmm]

>States screwed up when they took the civil part of marriage and associated it with the ceremonial part in a church.

Couldn't agree more. To me the correct answer is that the government should grant civil unions, and not recognize marriages in any legal way. Marriage should be between people and their religious institution. Want to get married? Great! Go to your church and sign your civil union documentation when you're done with the ceremony to get all the governmental perks. If your church doesn't want to allow homosexual marriage? Fine! Homosexuals can find an accepting congregation and get married there. Or they're non-religious, and can just go get a civil union without the marriage.

The real problem with the gay marriage debate hasn't been the inequality, or the bigotry, it's the fact that a religious institution got mixed up with a legal institution. So instead of teasing them apart, we've decided that the legal definition now partially defines the religious institution. That is why some people are going to continue to be somewhat justifiably angry about this. If we just gave them separate definitions, it would let people self-select private institutions whose definition they agreed with.

[abhorrence]

While I generally agree that it is annoying that religion and government got mixed up here, I've found that in a significant portion of cases, "marriage is religious, don't redefine it" is just a convenient cover for animus. Out of which things like North Carolina's 2012 state constitutional amendment came.

[MichaelGG]

Why two? Civil marriage should be a normal contract between n entities that are allowed to engage in contracts. It seems extremely inelegant to have arbitrary restrictions on it.

[Goronmon]

I think it's pretty straightforward to come up with reasons why it's important to limit marriage to as few people as possible. One strong one being that it could be very bad for society to allow wealthy men (and women, though I think it would be less common) to marry a large number of women, especially due to the negative effect such a situation would have on lower class men.

[MichaelGG]

But it's not limiting that. People are already free to do so and some religious or philosophies encourage or make it highly desirable. They just cannot be legally recognized which is pointlessly discriminatory.

[tome]

I'm quite tempted to choose n = 1 and get those tax breaks all for myself.

[rodgerd]

> States screwed up when they took the civil part of marriage and associated it with the ceremonial part in a church.

In England that was because the church - specifically the Anglican church - wanted to gain religious power over marriage as a mechanism to make it harder for Anglicans to marry into other faiths. So I'm not really sympathetic to churches in common law countries crying about this one.