Weird Al, I got your point from the word go, and don’t differ: categories are created to draw valid distinctions. I would not want, for example, to play matchmaker and link up Gobear and Siege, much as I’m certain they’d find each other enjoyable companions on a social/intellectual level – there’s a slight matter of conflicting orientations that would keep this from being anything but a good friendship.
What I think you’re missing is that we seem to be discussing what should be valid in the eyes of the law. It’s perfectly OK by me that the Catholic Church says that only men who subscribe to their doctrines may be priests – as a rule for them. If they try to enforce that rule on my church, that’s a quite different story. Much as it disgusts me that they do so, the Boy Scouts have every right to admit only straight theist boys and reject gay or athiest teens; they’re a private organization with the right to set limit on their membership.
Where I see the difference being drawn is that such-and-such category is deemed to have certain rights that are denied another category, without reasonable grounds for drawing the distinction.
If the SBC wishes to have only male-female married couples attend their church, fine. If the American Family Association wishes to restrict their definition of “family” to a father/mother/kids structure, that’s their business. But if they seek to have their definitions written into law, for whatever reason, they’d better be prepared to justify why those definitions are ones that the entire country should subscribe to – on Constitutional grounds, not their own religiously-based ones.
This is the whole bit with the Boy Scouts that comes up regularly. I think Scouting is excellent for boys in the age group it defines; I was a Scout, and I’m supportive of the concept of Scouting. But if they wish to bring religious and sexual-orientation (as opposed to active sex life) qualifications into what constitutes being a Scout, they’ve forfeited their right to feed at the public trough – they’re practicing an unconstitutional form of discrimination.
Likewise, I’m perfectly well aware that the Visibles and the evils, when married, will have even less chance of becoming parents than Barb and I did, except in the way that we adopted (pun unintentional but left in anyway). But I see little distinction in the intent with which they choose to marry and ours: they love each other to the extent that they wish to commit to spend the rest of their lives together and to undertake the mutual dependency of a marriage vis-à-vis each other. Yes, they’re each two men, not a man and a woman, and that doesn’t meet the traditional marriage qualifications – but what’s mandatory about the traditional qualifications? Mr. & Mrs. Loving did not meet the traditional qualifications for a couple in their day when they sued to get their home state, Virginia, to recognize their marriage.
Yes, the term does not mean precisely what it has up until now if it’s applied to them as well. But that’s no reason IMHO to deny them the civil rights associated with it. I recall a case in which, to prevent roommates and other “casual” connections from declaring themselves “families,” the Housing Authority of some Ohio city (Cleveland?) started using the Father-Knows-Best nuclear family definition – and ended up in a celebrated court case when they evicted a woman who had taken custody of her deceased adult daughter’s children and was raising them, grandmother and grandchildren.
There may be a logical reason for distinguishing heterosexual marriages for progeny from heterosexual marriages for love with no intent to have children from homosexual marriages from whatever else you care to dig up, including Sen. Santorum and his dogs, but I fail to see the grounds on which you may say, “These two adults of sound mind, choosing freely to enter into a marriage contract, are entitled to the following 1,045 benefits by state law; these other two adults, doing likewise, are not so entitled, because they don’t meet the opposite-sex qualification.”