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Will said:
What I would like is for just ONE person to give me solid, credible arguments for why two people, regardless of their sex, should not be able to get married. I sometimes wonder: Do they not realize that this sounds exactly like the laws banning blacks from marrying whites? There are arguments based on religion, but there is this little bit in the Constitution that says "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", and that's in there for a good reason. The State has no business in the Church, and vice versa.
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Bearing in mind, that this is a question of ethics, and as such is fundamentally unarguable on several levels, here is a roundabout and incomplete attempt at one:
Let's start with something else. Something that the supermajority of people believe is wrong: Murder. Murder is illeagal. It is also called wrong in the Bible. Obviously, murder is a religious issue, and the state has no right to intervene. Perhaps it is an ethical issue, instead. With ethics, things ultimately lie on fundamental, unproveable assumptions (some samples: with Kant's "pure logic", one must first assume: 1) that logic is applicable to ethics, 2) that "better" is something to be strived for, and 3) Kant's definition of what has intrinsic value; with self-interest or extended self-interest ethics, one must first assume that personal consequences matter in questions of ethics [not a given in all schools of ethics]; "feels good" ethics usually assume that it either doesn't matter anyway or that nature/God/whatever has provided the ultimate guide when producing your feelings (or that it is an evolutionary process, and if your ethics are flawed, they are supposed to cause you problems), or some variant; with God centered ethics, even assuming that the existence of God and every event statement in the Bible is wholly accurate in every detail, one first needs to assume that the created ethically ought to obey the rules laid out by the Creator; et cetera; et cetera), which are religion-like in nature. Murder penalties are therefore unconstitutional, and thus the state has no right to interfere on that basis.
You can replace "murder" in the above with virtually anything that's illeagal (with minor tweaks to the rest of the text), really - (in no particular order) rape, incest, theft, drug abuse, tax evasion, kiddie porn, gay marriage, or prostitution, to name a few. The above is complete bull, of course. But how can the case be argued that it IS bull? More specifically, can you debunk the above for murder, rape, incest, theft, kiddie porn, et cetera without also debunking the above your favorite issue: gay marriage, especially considering that it uses a good portion of the same basic approach that you used to say that gay marriage should be okay?
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Will said:
And it must be remembered that marriage was co-opted into religion, and the current religious significance is just the incorporation of very old secular (or pagan, depending on your viewpoint) traditions.
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That is one hypothesis. It isn't proven, however.