|
The purpose of marriage was to transfer property. It has nothing to do with "stable family relationships."
People figured out how to mate long before they figured out what property was. Once people had land and goods that they wanted kept in their families, they decided to come up with a method that would ensure that their property went to their progeny. Mating and generational property transfers worked well together, for obvious reasons, but the concept of marriage has much less to do with creating a stable place for kids to grow up (in some developmental and emotional sense) and much more to do with the economics of keeping people and families alive over multiple generations.
You say repeatedly, "the purpose of marriage is to provide a man and a woman a stable environment for rearing a child." It really was a tool to allow two men to make a financial transaction that they hoped would strengthen both families by trading a son or a daughter to the other for access to resources. Children from the union were a convenient, if necessary, byproduct of that transaction.
What we think of as the purpose of marriage now would be very alien to the people who came up with it, and indeed, to most people in all but the most recent generations. It worked to keep people/families alive. It no longer serves that purpose, and our definition of what marriage is, consequently, has changed. The new purpose of marriage has little reason, if any, to exclude gays, since the current purpose of marriage has everything to do with uniting two people who are in love.
|