[Faceman]

*afraid to join in on a debate so very late*
?Is this still a debate or just a fight on who's getting the last word? [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Anyway I'll state my opinion and say some things which probably have already been said on the 9! pages before.

1. homosexual marriage from a religious viewpoint:
No problem. Only thing you need to do is found a new religion that allows it. if there are enough gay people who want to get married they'll join it and you got yourself government funding. Existent religions have their own belief systems and you CANNOT force them to give that up. So probably no catholic marriage for Adam and Steve.

2. social benefits from marriage:
like tax breaks or the possibility to have the life partner inherit. We just have to think on what grounds we grant these to straight married couples and then decide wheter to give them to gays too.
If we focus on the children-issue it would be only logical to completely remove these favours from marriage and add them to parenthood thus taking away privileges from childless straight couples and giving them to homosexuals who have adopted a child for example.
There are of course other factors to marriage like having a person you can completely trust/rely on and who is providing you with strenghth while you're weak etc. and I can't quite see why homosexual couples would not be able to achieve that.
Basically a homosexual and a heterosexual couple only differ on one topic: their way of enjoying sexual intercourse. Now this is nothing that should concern the government because then we'd have to deny marriage to straight couples who choose to only enjoy similar forms of lovemaking.

The hot point of the issue is that a lot of religions would get offended if something that THEY classify as sickness would be named like something that is sacred to them.
And giving gay couples the privileges but not the actual name of "married" would probably offend them.