I've resisted the truly libertarian approach to gay marriage, which is that government shouldn't be in the marriage business in the first place. Isn't marriage too important to society for government not to be involved? But I guess I'm starting to come around, because this makes sense to me:
There are plenty of ways to defend the traditional definition of marriage, perhaps especially as protection for children in procreative relationships, which is really the only real stake the state has in regulating interpersonal relationships between consenting and non-consanguinal adults anyway. Non-procreative relationships can acquire most if not all of the legal benefits of marriage through partnership contracts. The real free-market solution is to get government out of marriage altogether and let the churches define it for their congregants and have everyone rely on contracts, which government is actually suited to enforce.
That comes in a piece reacting to Dr. Ben Carson's rather odd way of defending traditional marriage, by asserting that men having sex in prison shows that being gay is a choice. Not much that goes on in prison is by choice, I'm thinking.
If government stops defining marriage, then all get-togethers would be civil unions, enforced under contract law, and whether or not it's a "marriage" would be outside of government control. I suppose the people who might feel discriminated against would be non-believers who don't have a church to solemnify their unions.
