Cory Booker's excellent critique of putting same-sex marriage to a New Jersey referrendum Cory Booker on Gay Marriage NJ Ballot Initiative elicited a comment including an argument I thought had largely passed into the obscurity it deserves.
The "Only Breeders Should Marry" argument - essentially that the begetting (his term) of children is the overwhelming priority for the institution of marriage, and the capacity to do so is present only in heterosexual marriage - is in the gentleman's comments, and I will not reproduce (no pun intended) them here. But I offer this rebuttal:
If this line of...reasoning...is to be taken seriously, then a "fruitless marriage" - a term of choice for "heterosexual spouses who had no children" among those who argued this line in the past - lose significant legitimacy. Since those couples have failed in their "unique and special" responsibility in marriage - even if through no decision of their own, but because they are biologically unable to conceive - should they also lose the status and rights of property transfer, etc. that married persons enjoy? If a person who knows she cannot conceive, or that he cannot cause conception, should the state deny that person the right to marry?
Furthermore, what I hear you positing would lead me to think that unmarried heterosexual couples who have children should be more favored than those who do not, when the opposite is true, particularly among the DOMA-supporting crowd.
Finally, it is far more important that a marriage succeed in nurturing the children it has than in producing more children, especially in a world with so many abandoned, orphaned, or negligently parented children. To that end, there are many same-gender loving couples who have and can do a spectacularly fine job of nurturing children that they chose to have in their family when others who bred them chose to not nurture them. This "observation of fact", the claimed basis for this gentleman's argument to deny marriage equality, puts to lie any other basis for DOMA than the capacity to breed.
Pity, then, that there is such a large overlap between the populations that support DOMA and that want to remove or reduce funding for WIC, Head Start, school lunch programs, and aggressive response to domestic violence.
I have trouble taking seriously people who, in their rhetoric, love babies; but do not, in their actions, love children.