MARRIAGE: "NOTHING TO DO WITH GETTING CHILDREN WHAT THEY NEED":
Columnist Maggie Gallegher's Analysis Cuts Through Massachusetts B.S.

Observes Gallagher in her column today:

Four judges in Massachusetts, ruling in a same-sex marriage case, have decided that children don't need mothers and fathers, that marriage has nothing to do with getting children what they need. Marriage is a passing plaything of the latest fashionable ideology, a toy for adults with graduate degrees to tinker with, at their pleasure.

[These judges] displayed their own massive ignorance about marriage, its history and its public purposes. Four people claim that "the government creates marriage." There is no rational reason, they claim, for the state legislature to require that for a marriage you need a husband and a wife, who can become a mother and a father for their children.

So why have marriage at all?, Gallagher asks. Because [quoting the judges]:

"Civil marriage anchors an ordered society by encouraging stable relationships over transient ones. It is central to the way the Commonwealth identifies individuals, provides for the orderly distribution of property, insures that children and adults are cared for and supported whenever possible from private rather than public funds, and tracks important epidemiological and demographic data."

Translation: "So that the civil government can operate more efficiently" and, as Gallagher points out, in this mindset,

"Marriage is whatever the adults want. People have a right to conduct a great social experiment on children because, well, adults want to do it, and doing your own thing is the new law of the land.

As one philosopher pointed out long ago regarding pantheism, if everything is God then there is no such thing as God, for there is no dictinction between the Creator and the created. Likewise, the bottom line is that if marriage can be any and every sort of "relationship" between any and every sort of couple --i.e., there are no dictinctions to be made between marriage and mere coupling-- then, ultimately, there's no such thing as marriage.