What about them? By your logic, won't be able to get married, unless they adopt, since they can't have kids, it's clear-cut.
> What about men and women who simply aren't fertile, for whatever reason?
Same, no marriage, unless they adopt.
> What about families in places where births aren't registered? Such places still exist.
Can't get married unless they register their kids. We can't have them benefitting from the institution of marriage if they aren't willing to do the legwork.
> What about the death of a couple's only child?
Could go either way, they gave it a shot. I'd be for letting them stay married.
> What effect has all this on divorce?
I don't know, what effect does not letting homosexuals get married have on divorce? Same deal.
> "Creepy edge cases."
Not really, though, they have pretty easy answers.
> And I can't see how maintaining all this additional information on which married status is now contingent (unless it's not!) could be achieved without a massive increase of bureaucracy, with its concomitant cost.
What's the additional information? It's literally "do you have any children? yes/no", which the state already has. You're literally advocating guesswork instead of using one simple and readily available piece of information.
I don't know, these arguments are so bad that I feel like you're trying to avoid recognizing that my solution is clearly superior. It makes me wonder what the real reason for you being against homosexual marriage is.
Civil discourse usually ends by presenting your clearly superior points and letting the weight of their clear superiority carry the day.
Questioning what the real reason for [him] being against homosexual marriage is an "Ad hominem fallacy".
As I've just mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I think a lot of this has origin in my failure to make clear that I'm not arguing one vast change in the status quo versus another, but rather arguing one vast change in the status quo versus no such change. (Status quo ante at this point, of course, but let's not get hung up on that point, when we've spent the entire conversation to date assuming that this is still a question meriting discussion.) Making marriage contingent on procreative capacity would be a vast change to the status quo. Permitting homosexual couples to marry, exactly as heterosexual couples do, is also a vast change to the status quo. There are cases in which vast changes to the status quo are not merely justifiable but utterly necessary. This does not seem to me to be such a case.