What is marriage about?

Kevin D. Williamson believes that civil marriage law is about where babies come from, not

the sexual and emotional interests of adults.

...the 21st-century ethic labors to elide the differences between men and women, between what we once called marriage and what we now call marriage and what we will probably call marriage after the Supreme Court gets done with it. If gay couples want to share property, designate their partners in medical, legal, and financial matters, etc., then the law should accommodate them. If they seek blessings for their unions, there are those who would bless them, and those who — so long as the First Amendment holds — would exercise their right to choose not to. But that is not what civil-marriage law is there to do. It is not about the fulfillment or happiness of married people. It is about where babies come from. Those who believe that to be an “unreasonable” position arrive at that conclusion mainly by refusing to consider the position at all. Instead, they dismiss it as hypocritical, illogical, etc.

That’s one of the reasons why the opponents of same-sex marriage are going to lose that fight. The second reason is that even if same-sex marriages were outlawed nationally, a return to the status quo ante would represent only another kind of defeat: The regime of no-fault divorce, the normalization of nonmarital parenting, abortion on demand, and the rest, which far precedes any move toward same-sex marriage, also constitutes a model of marriage organized around the sexual and emotional interests of adults rather than around the wellbeing of children.

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