[goldstategop]

More to the point, a child needs a mother and a father. Marriage is not about exclusive adult sexual gratification, as people seem to assume. Its role is to give legal title to their offspring and to help raise the next generation. Those are aspects of marriage that no homosexual union, however well intentioned it might be, is capable of fulfilling. We need to really have a debate about what is best for the children. Calling people bigots for opposing a marital union that would damage our kids is undeserved. We need a debate over marriage and its not the one we're getting from those who wish to redefine the meaning of the institution.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[supercat]

More to the point, a child needs a mother and a father.

Further, it's very desirable that a child have an identifiable mother and father. There's a simple reason that polygyny (multiple wives) is much more widely practiced than polyandry (multiple husbands): even if a man has sex with a dozen wives, there will be no doubt is to the identity of any child's parents; if a woman had sex with a dozen husbands, however, there would be no way of knowing which children were fathered by whom.

Incidentally, the rules about adultery are asymmetric for essentially that reason. If a married woman sleeps with a man not her husband, she prevents her husband from knowing which children are his. By contrast, a married man who sleeps with an unmarried woman in no way prevents his wife from knowing which children are hers.