One is religious, and I doubt you’d sympathise with that; let’s just say an easy way out of that one would be to defining all civil unions as such, but it actually would miss some point.
Another one is biologic: heterosexual couples are expected to have children. Of course, that should mean that couples without shouldn’t benefit, but they might be considered saving money while planning, and there is the embarrassing debate about what to do with people marrying in their 40s… That goes against the increasingly visible case of gay couples adopting, or using donations/surrogates. But the idea is: that tax benefit and public recognition is a natalist argument.
(I’m like that: you can way what you want is subjective, but Statistical methodology… I instantly switch to heavy weaponry and my loud voice.)
If you mean conceptually independant: absolutely. Social recognition of a homosexual orientation has been associated with many choice patterns, most of which didn’t include marriage, mainly because that hasn’t been a historically considered model: priesthood, separation of family ties and sexual pleasures, even projection onto educational purposes…
If you mean “statistically not correlated”, then you are wrong: there is a high correlation between people holding unambiguously homophobic position, and them opposing same-sex marriage.
You can’t consider one in abstract without the other.
Let’s take an example: There is little logical connection between being rich and behaving like a jerk, yet… psychological experiments tend to indicate the former appears to cause the later. If you want a more honest society and a fair market, that correlation needs to be considered to inform reforms. There is little formal connexion between coding and favoring libertarian ideas, yet… that happens a lot, and it does influence the role of technology in society. If you held sincerely an opinion that is mainly shared by jerks, that’s fine if you are not one -- but you can’t expect to defend it without some preliminaries; not excuses, just precautions.
That can seem meaningless to a liberal, but conservatives have a heighten sense of ‘purity’, and tend to vehemently refuse misappropriations or risk of ‘contamination’, sometimes beyond the scale of the real issue. Examples in the US include: ‘sacred’ money meant for church should not be taxed by secular government, or, benefits meant for people in need should not go to undeserving people; one should not indulge people who commit crimes; young impressionable teens should not frequent lost souls, etc.
And to be clear: yes, that should mean people shouldn’t marry after menopause -- rationalisation of that include continuity, traditions or even direct reference to Abraham and Sarah. Details are probably more individual.
What matters is that you understand there is a consistency to the over-all idea, in spite of the apparent contradictions, and you can’t move forward unless you make sense of it. It‘s the classic exercice in rhetoric of being able to convincingly prove the opposite of your position in order to be able to defend it.
Take my paternal grandparents. When my grandmother was still alive, the two of them happily lived together and cared for one another even though my grandfather was at that point experiencing the early onset of dementia.
When she died, my grandfather had to go into residential care, paid for partly by their pension, partly by my parents and uncles, and partly through the subsidy that the state provide for elderly people going into care homes.
The more people who are able to live together in a mutually caring relationship like a long-term marriage, the less people need to go into care homes meaning the less subsidy needs to go into that kind of care for the elderly.
Marriage has a societal benefit in promoting that kind of mutual care, regardless of the gender of the partners and regardless of whether you have kids (and, hell, same-sex couples can and do have kids, so that's a shit argument anyway).
Could you set up another system to provide that kind of benefit? Sure. But this is the system we have and it should be available to long-term gay couples as it is for straight couples.
Disclaimer: I'm single, so I'm not arguing for these benefits. That's just what I always thought the reason was.
Married couples in the US most get tax benefits to the extent to which they have a significant imbalance in income, and it seems to be a lot more connected to the idea of traditional division of labor (one partner working in the trade economy while the other provides in-home support for that partner) than children, per se.
They are tax benefits that directly subsidize children, but they aren't conditioned on marriage.
> I find it weird that this argument has so far been completely ignored by either side in the pro/anti-gay marriage discussion (at least as far as I've seen).
The idea that the civil benefits of marriage are inherently tied to the purpose of promoting reproduction are rather central arguments in the anti-same-sex-marriage camp; this was, in fact, the main argument for Prop. 8's constitutionality offered by its proponents.
My apologies then, I haven't followed the gay marriage discussion in general, only the discussion about Brendan Eich.
The injustice is simply in the sit-in-the-back-of-the-bus thing - that a lesbian couple should be stamped 'civil union' just so everybody knows they're not as good. Its Jim Crow all over again.
Why are gay citizens equal enough to have equal tax laws but not equal marriage laws?