I have spent my couple decades reading this board as a way to improve myself, and fight my own ignorance. So in the interest of doing that, I refer to this post from kevlaw.
I admit, I can’t. But I’m willing to learn! So if anybody has a non-homophobic reason for being anti-SSM, let’s hear it!
Here is one way as I see it.
You are raised in a church and faith you believe in.
That church says SSM is wrong, it is a sin.
The person in question may not be homophobic but he follows his Faith as he was taught and that faith is homophobic.
It is a little convoluted, but that is one scenario.
Please keep in mind I am just suggesting an answer to your question, not my own belief, I have no religious faith at all. I’m an agnostic.
There’s only one reason I can think of: If you don’t want a gay marriage for yourself, because you’re not gay. Once you meddle in the affairs of two other people, who aren’t you, there is no other reason.
I had a buddy like that. Insisted that he didn’t have anything against gays, he was just following the Bible. Then I thought back to all the slurs he’d used and the hateful comments he’d made in the time I’d known him.
Since posting the topic, thinking long and hard about it, your response mirrors the best I could come up with on my own. Which has led to an internal dialog about what that really means; is “inherited” homophobia (from faith, from parents) any less homophobic? I mean, that’s one of the sticky issues with racism, too; it has a strong tendency to be “handed down”, as it were… but that doesn’t make it any less racist.
If a church teaches that the races must be kept separate, that’s still racist, even if it’s a genuinely held religious belief. Same goes for homosexuality and gay marriage. It’s still bigoted to believe that gay marriage is wrong because your church says so.
The answer to the question is as clearly “no” as the answer to the question “is there a non-racist reason to support mandatory racial segregation?”.
I think there are cases where there might be a difference.
I was against SSM for no good reason, just basically ignorance. Somewhere around 2000 my wife used a logical argument to make me realize how stupid I was being.
But before that, I was not homophobic. I had marched in a Gay Pride parade. I had risked being beat up taking on protesters in the 80s that wanted to “quarantine all the gays to protect us from aids.”
This was me on trans issues; Una Persson and others set me straight, with logic and rational discussion.
Ok. I don’t agree with this, but I can see this argument:
Families, not individuals, are the fundamental building blocks of society (lots of conservative thought implicitly assumes this). As such, we need the vast majority of people to be in heterosexual marriages, with children. Society is just shaped around that organization. So gay marriage, along with easy divorce, contraception, career-minded women, all that, threaten the fundamental structure of society. We should not be recognizing any institutions that encourage deviations from that model.
I don’t agree with any of that, in case it’s not clear, but it’s not inherently religious.
I can come up with a dodge that is not explicitly bigoted, but is very problematic in other ways, and ends up being at best judgemental and possibly bigoted in alternative ways!
Specifically, if you subscribe to the philosophy that humanity has gotten to where it is by maximizing our potential via the randomized reproduction that is sexual reproduction, there is the thought that you don’t ‘own’ your genes. Under this extreme philosophy, you have a duty to reproduce which would preclude SSM.
It would also indicate you have a responsibility to reproduce (very questionable ethically and financially) and devalue anyone unable to reproduce for any reason.
For me, this is just a different sort of scientific racism, as well as misunderstanding how evolution tends to work when many external factors regarding ‘natural selection’ aren’t an issue, but it would dodge the traditionally bigoted reason in favor of a very different one. 
As a practical answer, if you live in any nation that doesn’t have a legal SSM option, there is the non-bigoted reason of I’m against you doing it (say in the US) because I don’t want you to be imprisoned/killed for it when you return home. I’m not bigoted in myself, but concerned about your welfare in challenging your local legislation. But honestly, that’s not worrying about SSM on it’s own merits, it’s about the legal system you’re working under.
I suppose if there was some sort of desperate survival situation where everyone in a group had to reproduce as much as possible or risk the group being wiped out… maybe. Except you have have same-sex partners even as you conceive/sire offspring with someone outside that.
Well, sure, but if you see the family as an economic unit, not a romantic one, that doesn’t matter. Marriage is more about economic and social identity than love.
And for those types, it doesn’t have to be a survival thing. It’s just family, including children produced within the unit, is the point. It’s like, how society is organized.
It’s not a good argument. It only works if you accept that society needs to be divided into families as a self-evident truth.
All that argument promotes is that gay people shouldn’t be able to get married, too.
I know you said that you don’t espouse that view, but you must recognize its inherent bigotry.
I think the answer has to simply be no.
On countless occasions, the ‘inability to reproduce’ comes up, but it’s so easily refuted by asking if childless-by-choice, post-menopausal, and infertile couples should be barred from marriage or forced to divorce.
Yeah. I’m going to go with ‘no’ on this one.
And just to amplify that religion really shouldn’t be used as a veneer to pretty up one’s own bigotry and/or ignorance. That leads to the oh-so-simple arguments best offered up by Bartlet, in “The West Wing:”
If I understood this correctly, Kron was previously opposed to trans-rights for non-bigoted reasons (or bigoted reasons? It’s not clear from this short quote). Una Persson was willing to engage him in discussion and set him straight.
This is what I was advocating for in the discussion that led to this spin-off. That we should be willing to engage in discussion with people we disagree with even if they are bigots. If you reject all possible opposing arguments as bigoted ahead of time you can then condemn your opponent as a bigot without argument. This is a handy trick for winning debates by default.
Are you only looking for good reasons, or will you accept reasons that are bad even though they’re not homophobic?
And how are we defining “non-homophobic” or “non-bigoted”? After all, no true Scotsman would be against same-sex marriage.
As I understand it, there are people, including homosexual people, who are against same-sex marriage because they are against marriage.
There are, or at least there have been in the past, people who are against same-sex marriage out of inertia: in most societies throughout most of human history there has not been same-sex marriage.
I get the impression that some of the people who oppose same-sex marriage have the idea that, in a marriage, “husband” and “wife” are two distinct roles, that must be played by a man and a woman respectively, sort of like a nut and bolt, or a mortar and pestle; and that a marriage consisting of two husbands, or of two wives, would be like having two mortars with no pestle, or two pestles with no mortar. People holding this view may have narrow, rigid, or outdated notions of sex roles or of how marriage works, without necessarily being homophobic per se.
One things that some posters seem to forget, is some bigots are open to logical arguments and/or being educated. “Fighting ignorance” works better with patience than a hammer.
I think one of the other leading ‘arguments’ is the ‘not natural’ canard, despite the fact that several thousand species exhibit homosexuality in nature, and the fact that there’s no evidence of marriage or religion in other species (ipso facto rendering those things ‘unnatural’).
Still going with ‘no.’
Exactly - “that’s a bigoted view” doesn’t have to be the end of debate - it can lead to “here’s why that’s a bigoted (and harmful) view”, and assuming a good faith opinion-haver, they would be open to the possibility they have a bigoted view and would consider changing it.
Some, sure. But on SSM, the opponents are so entrenched that there’s not usually any point in talking to them.
Now, some kid who was raised in a bigoted household and who is just starting to venture out on their own. You might be able to reason with them.