suviko

Yeah, marriage is an institution. Have you been reading functionalist social theory perhaps? They don't ONLY say that marriage is an institution, but also that other institutions can take it's place and do the same things in society if needed and that marriage has many forms. We claim that western people are monogamous what comes to marriage, but are we? There's really big percentage of couples of which one or both are rewed. Serial monogamy can be argued to be a kind of polygamy. And while co-habiting hasn't the same legal privileges, it is also an institution in the West by now. People know what that phrase means automatically and they know how the behaviour pattern of things work, just the same as when someone says "marriage", it gives us a rough idea of what these people are doing and what their life is like compared to say singles or widows.


As stated above, there are many sorts of institutions and institutions, same as the state and communities evolve. If marriage as institution is in decline, that can tell us it might be not needed anymore. The post-modern or post-technlogical society has pluralistic values and that most people accept. We might have to let go of the idea that marriage means the same for everybody.

In the 1960, most of the brits and us citizens whined it's somehow touching into their "privacy and civil rights" if they are made to wear seat belts.. ATM in Finland, the state doesn't want to give groceries rights to sell wines when majority of the population wants it and the reason is that alcohol related diseases and death rates would go up. Common people are not always the best judges to choose what is best for the WHOLE of society. They think about themselves, their own family and their friends.

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2) Opening up marriage to same-sex couple will send a message that marriage is not entwined with the nuclear family and that it is seen as just a legal mechanism for conferring certain rights and benefits upon long-standing couples. This devalues marriage and undermines it as a pillar that supprts the nuclear family.

I don't know man-man-children families, but I know many lesbian families and they live just like nuclear families and they are by no way threat to those values. They BECOME threat to those values if they are somehow not allowed to live as a family and be like everybody else; Then they have to live as something else and become rebels.

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3) Opening up marriage to same-sex couples will be the death knell of its exclusivity. The allowance of same-sex marriage will require a rewriting of the rights, benefits and duties of married couples (because marriage laws were written with male-female unions in mind and many laws will no longer be appropriate), which will almost inevitably be a "dumbing down". There will be less that is special and 'set-apart' about marriage and its currency and worth will be devalued.

The social world has to be redefined all the time. Usually the eritten code is not changed, but the practice changes. Compare the family life 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 yaers ago.. It's not static, family and marriage as institutions are all the time redefined. You can't beat your kids or wife nowadays. You can't sleep with your household servants freely - or who even has those, and if someone has, who counts them to belong to your family?? It's not automatically devalued. It's revalued.

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4) The institution of marriage currently has the total support of the church.

Actually, it never has. It's still taboo to marry cross-racially in some places and societies. It's still and probably will always be forbidden to marry your close realtives. These all are sovial norms and the church or the people belonging to it uphold it. Marriage of Suitable People [tm] have total support.

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This support is very important, especially in a religious country like the US. Allowing same-sex marriage will seriously undermine the support that the church can, and would want to, give it. It will drive a wedge between the church and the state on the issue of marriage. --- .

Even if US is more religious than most European or some Oceanian & Asian nations, you still uphold the idea that church & state are separated, right?

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Marriage is dead, the population is divided and children suffer.

Marriage will most likely never totally die. It will just change, as it has, through history and cultures. It's a popular overreaction to scream "History/religion/art/politics/marriage/substitute-some-other-valuable-institution-in-here is dead!" when times are changing and in the days when Bible was written, some people thought ways are already so currupt and things so bad that God mus be putting and end to this World.