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Originally Posted by alansmithee
But it would be hard to screen for all of those things
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No, it would be easy. In fact, you could very easily screen for every thing that prevents any couple from having children - even the lack of intention (I have quite a few married friends who strongly intend to never have children). All you have to do is require pregnancy as a prerequisite to marriage.
And then after the child is born, it can be DNA tested against the now married father. If it does not match, the marriage is declared void. Even if we want to avoid the cost of DNA testing, the pregnancy prerequisite would still prevent the vast majority of non-reproduction-centric marriages.
If the sole purpose of government defined marriage is to promote reproduction, marriage laws would be defined precisely according to the system I just outlined. It wouldn't even be difficult. Since those are not the laws and the laws have never been anything even remotely similar to that, it demonstrates that even if reproduction is a portion of government defined marriage, it is certainly not the sole factor. And considering just how unlike the laws of marriage are to the simple method illustrated above, it is doubtful that even a significant portion of government sanctioned marriage is based on reproduction.
Therefore, in order to hold onto your opinion that gov't should not sanction gay marriage, you must describe what you believe are the other purposes of government sanctioned marriage and then explain how those other purposes justify the prevention of gay marriage.