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Disclaimer: I am a gay man, and my support of gay marriage has always been a gray area. The elephant in the room that must be established here is a biological

Disclaimer: I am a gay man, and my support of gay marriage has always been a gray area. The elephant in the room that must be established here is a biological one. As much as we can hold hands and sing about the beauty of love, it remains that biologically, only a man and a woman can have children. Historically, it is this dependency, this social contract to promise to stay together to raise one's children, that has given rise to many of the legal protections that a marriage license provides. Now, there have been lots of heterosexual couples who marry on paper, never have kids, and for them it's largely a financial commitment (legally) and less of a social contract. I don't think same sex marriage is different in a financial regard than these examples, so I support it. But the situation gets somewhat more hairy when you consider that same sex couples may still want to raise children, and then the issue of surrogate mothers, adoption, same sex households, and all sorts of other potential legal complications come into play. How would a custody case play out with two fathers, for example? I'm not arguing for or against same sex marriage, and I'm personally in a polyamorous relationship that's unlikely to be recognized legally in any way shape or form, so there's that as well. I just want to draw attention to some of the hidden complexities that it introduces.

liveoneggs 10y ago
> How would a custody case play out with two fathers, for example? These already exist. Gay couples have kids, even married ones.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Historically, it is this dependency, this social contract to promise to stay together to raise one's children, that has given rise to many of the legal protections that a marriage license provides. Not really. Most of the legal effects of marriage amount to legal privileges of the parties to the marriage with respect to each other, both with property and in some power-of-attorney like ways. The big exception is the presumption (rebuttable or absolute, depending on the jurisdiction) of paternity, which may be irrelevant to same sex [0] marriages (though, in principle, even ignoring the issues under the previous footnote the absolute form and it's stability-over-biology related motivations is equally applicable to same-sex female unions as it is to opposite-sex unions.) [0] Though given that legal sex is really a form of socially-ascribed gender and may not align with biological sex, it's also arguable that presumption of paternity is just as applicable to same (legal) sex unions as opposite sex unions as a class, though statistically less likely to be relevant to any particular same sex union, given the loose correlation between biological and legal sex.

liveoneggs 10y ago

> How would a custody case play out with two fathers, for example? These already exist. Gay couples have kids, even married ones.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Historically, it is this dependency, this social contract to promise to stay together to raise one's children, that has given rise to many of the legal protections that a marriage license provides. Not really. Most of the legal effects of marriage amount to legal privileges of the parties to the marriage with respect to each other, both with property and in some power-of-attorney like ways. The big exception is the presumption (rebuttable or absolute, depending on the jurisdiction) of paternity, which may be irrelevant to same sex [0] marriages (though, in principle, even ignoring the issues under the previous footnote the absolute form and it's stability-over-biology related motivations is equally applicable to same-sex female unions as it is to opposite-sex unions.) [0] Though given that legal sex is really a form of socially-ascribed gender and may not align with biological sex, it's also arguable that presumption of paternity is just as applicable to same (legal) sex unions as opposite sex unions as a class, though statistically less likely to be relevant to any particular same sex union, given the loose correlation between biological and legal sex.