Because lots of people seem to insist that gay marriage will only affect the gay people who want to marry, with no impact on society. That's silly.
As ID noted, we've been over this before, and there are effects that go beyond those people immediately targeted.
Explaining exactly what is cause, what is effect, and what is correlation is very difficult, but Huntster is making a statement that is so obvious that it should be beyond dispute.
These large-scale effects are not pinned down. Again, I could just as easily show gay marriage causes more stable families and less divorce as you could show it causes less people to marry, but neither positions are near strong. I’d rather have more stable families than more people in legal marriage anyway, if I had to pick.
Personally, I don’t find it counterintuitive that the countries that have implemented gay marriage seem to have a stronger emphasis on keeping stable families than we do in the US. If anything, I think that is one of the possible causes of SSM becoming a part of law, not the other way around.
Gay marriage changes the culture. I think you understand that, and think it's a good change.
Of course, I wouldn’t want it to happen otherwise, and it’s troubling you’d question that. You know as well as I do that, the moment you become a parent, your culture, the entire world, stops being something that’s yours and becomes something you rent. If I thought this would harm the next generation I’d be by Huntster’s side.
But I can point to clear positive effects on the culture at large, many of which are indisputable, as plain as day, and with a well understood mechanism: more citizens being more responsible for their obligations, punishable by law if they cheat, strengthening of their families, stability for their kids, less people on welfare, more of their kids having stay-at-home parents, more tax revenues, and so on. All that affects you and the larger culture positively.
On a slightly smaller scale, do you realize how many straight people depend on the gay marriages in their lives? I had well over 100 at mine, and that was over a decade ago. All those aunts, cousins, grandparents and so on, they all count on us staying together, having a stable relationship with my partner and in-laws and our kids, just as I count on them keeping their families together.
On the other hand, these claims about gay marriage causing straight people to treat marriage more negatively are far from definite. They have no clear mechanism, those they do have are based on odd conjecture at best, and the trends they try to use as data can be easily countered by contrary data and their existence prior to SSM, not to mention that many countries aren’t really out of the noise of normal fluctuations in such rates.
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