[Livemike]

Quote by: Dirty Name Because heterosexual people - having natural sexual relations - often produce offspring. Having a child results in economic and physical sacrifice for pregnant women. Also the offspring represent a compelling interest of the state insofar as the biological parent's failure to care for them results in substantial costs to the state and, generally speaking, decreased success in raising the offspring.

Homosexual people often produce offspring too nowdays. In fact many of them
always did. The offspring doesn't represent a compelling interest of the State because
they don't own or control it. It's true that if the offspring is not cared for there might be
expenses for the State, but that's true for almost anything.

Quote by: Dirty Name Clearly, the biological parenting model is the most efficient model from the state's big picture perspective. State recognition of marriage also helps mitigate the economic and physical sacrifices made by child-bearing women, including those women who never get pregnant but who make sacrifices on the assumption they might.

Well no, having a contract to provide for a woman in the event she gets pregnant
does that. State recognition of "marriage" limits the forms of those contracts and thus
makes it harder to mitigate those sacrifices.

Quote by: Dirty Name Therefore, the state has a compelling interest to protect women in obvious, child-producing relationships, and the state also has a compelling interest to encourage responsible biological parenthood (not conception, but parenthood) over all other parenting models.

Again no. There is no evidence that "responsible biological parenthood" is the
best option in all cases. In fact considering the number of adopted children it's
clear that it isn't. So the State has no more reason to promote it that any other
workable childrearing model.

Quote by: Dirty Name To the extent that other forms of parenthood are necessary, the state already has mechanisms in place to stimulate them (adoption tax credits, foster parent subsidies, and in many cases, medicaid coverage to name a few). To the extent that some heterosexual relationships do not result in offspring, the state would defeat it's own purpose (strenghtening relationships between potential biological parents) if they limit marriage recognition to couples who have already produced children. Further, in most cases, the state would incur greater cost to filter infertile couples out of the system than by simply recognizing all heterosexual marriages. The system works as designed. Getting rid of it just because you don't think it's "fair" to everyone requires us to turn a blind eye toward the very real fact that couples are not granted equality in the same sense that individuals are.

Well if you're not granting equality in recognition of relationships you're not granting
equality to the individuals in those relationships.