Marriage laws work by embodying and promoting a true vision of what marriage is that makes sense of marital norms such as monogamy, responsible procreation, exclusivity and lifelong commitment.

To define is to set limits i.e. to delimit. Boundaries are drawn around essential features or a core of the social reality of marital union.

The marriage idea is rejected by the advocates of the SSM idea. They say the state may not define marriage. They say that the word is an empty thing that is means whatever consenting participants want it to mean. That view means, in principle and in effect, that the state would abolish marriage.

The state may define marriage in terms of drawing boundaries around the core of this type of relationship. Afterall, marriage is for marriage and not other stuff.

The state may abolish marital status. It may subvert marriage for nonmarriage purposes. It may obscure the core of marriage and hinder social understanding of what marriage that merits the preferential status in policy and in law.

But that is the way of doing damage to marriage. Redefining marriage as SSMers demand it be redefined amounts to abolition and not merely a hindrance to social reality of marriage.

Government can do harm. It can do better. That is the basic point. It concedes nothing.

That's why NOM exists.

Stephen! Don't progressive liberals working at Soros "non-profits" like Media Matters make a salary over there or are they simply volunteers for the cause of destroying life as we know just for the heck of it?
All of you trolls - stop carping on the amount of money Brian, Maggie or anyone else here makes until you can prove to us that people working at liberal organizations live on air alone.....

"Many have argued on this site, that marriage, as a pre political institution, cannot be defined or redefined by any government. Is it my imagination, or did Brian just concede that point?"

Yes Brian conceded the point. The more interesting question is why..?

Why concede a matter of standing federal law, fundamental constitutional rights, natural law, & international human rights law..??

Our courts have grown so tyrannical & lawless over the last 40 years that Brian & the folks at NOM have taken rear guard political strategy..

They know current sitting Supreme Court Justices have no regard for the rule of law or limits on state power (the purpose of constitutions) so they are very weary of trying to box them in even though no state has the right to redefine marriage.

Telling the current SCOTUS majority that the definition of marriage is outside their purview is like telling a petulant child that he cant have what he wants...he's more likely to take the command (no matter how valid) as an excuse to simply grab all he can.

So they have rhetorically surrendered well established standing federal supreme court precedent in favor of (at the very least) allowing the people a voice in their own country..

Perhaps this softer approach (it is imagined) will cause the petulant child to consider not breaking as many laws as he otherwise would if he were told (flat-out) ..." No,...you know your not allowed to do that" ...

This strategey gives the Justices more wiggle room to either uphold the law, or allow the people to decide or break the law completley for the country as a whole.

FYI: Brian Brown made $230,000 from this nonsense last year. Maggie Gallagher made $160,000.

That's why NOM exists.

No matter how fervently you wish it, no matter how many media talking heads state it, no matter how many leftist (that is, Democratic) political figues bloviate over it, you are no more married than you are to the Man in the Moon! The ONLY thing coming on the cultural front, therefore, is ever more powerful movements of clinically normal people fed up with the cultural rot your side has been spilling since the Sixties.

All you and your so-called community are are left-overs from thar era, and ever-larger numbers are beginning to see that, and not just here in the US, but around the world.

My advice? Take your fantasies and peddle them at Moveon.

Because society does not have any interest in you and your best friend staying together. Society has an interest in true marriage because men and women are the way that children are created, and parents taking responsibility for the children that they create and children having both parents are ideal goals of society.

You and your best friend, being to dudes, are not now nor were ever capable of creating children; thus, the ideals that marriage seeks to achieve are not served in any respect by your relationship. You are no different from any two guys who decide to rent an apartment together, or a man living with his elderly mom, or two sisters sharing a house. Why should you be treated differently from those couples?

If nothing will change then there is no reason whatsoever to do it.

Because your partnership has produced nothing of any lasting value for society.

Husband: the man to whom a woman is married

You do not have a husband; you have a facade based on bastardized language that is designed to lend an appearance of acceptability to your depravity.

Reminds me of the movie 'Saturn3' where a robot murders a man, drapes his structure in his victims skin, and declares himself human in order to win over Farah.

Explain to me why, after having lived with my husband for 43 years, we are not able to enjoy the LEGAL protections of CIVIL marriage? Even though our state enjoys marriage equality and we are legally married the federal government stops us from enjoying the same civil rights as others. Yes, same-sex marriage was a new idea (it's not really any more having been proved to be a success) but so were computers. We all got used to them. As soon as NOM stops hyperventilating we can all get on with our lives and I promise - you won't even know when marriage equality comes to the US because nothing for you will change.

"So if the state has the power to define marriage as one man/one woman (of majority age, not blood related, etc.), then doesn't it have the power to define marriage as any two nonrelated, consenting adults?"

No, the state does not have the power to rewrite the male/female natures. To redefine Marriage is to obscure the differences of the two genders which Marriage enshrines for children to understand. Now I know some have argued that redefining Marriage doesn't do this, but all too often do we see the after effects. In schools around the world-notably Sweden-they have established gender-neutral classrooms where everyone is referred to as "friend" instead of him/her. This social experiment occurred AFTER they redefined Marriage.

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Only one. The one that pays Brian Brown salary.

First, answer me this:

Why do same-sex "marriage" activists disingenuously claim that homosexuals are 10% of the population, while SSM advocates state that homosexuals are around 3% of the population?

Well said!

These pairing produce nothing of any real lasting value to society.

If the State can show a compelling interest in doing so that trumps the 1st Amendments right of conscience and free exercise thereof.

The State has no compelling reason to do so because same-sex pairings are not a public good; they provide no benefit to society as a whole whatsoever, in that said pairings produce nothing of lasting value.

With strange social and cultural shifts making strange demands on the government to recognize a word implicitly defined through the ages as something that it has never been, and such word being entrenched in the law and society, it should not only be constitutional for a state to define marriage but, indeed, necessary to define it, and to define it as it has been known for the thousands of years that the institution has existed and the hundreds of years for which laws and mores have been developed around it.

Changing the definition of marriage changes not only marriage, but everything that marriage has come to stand for, putting in jeopardy all of the good that marriage has done for society.

The answer is, clearly, yes.

But SS"M" advocates argue that doing so is unconstitutional.