When marriage lost its unique status, women and children most frequently were the direct victims. One can no more expand a definition of marriage than one can expand the definition of a yardstick and still use it as a reliable measure. Marriage-based kinship is essential to stability and continuity. Same-sex relations are a negation of the ties that bind, which are the continuation of kinships through the procreation of children. Even childless married couples retain the possibility of becoming parents either biologically or through adoption, thus providing children with role models of both sexes.
Marriages benefit more than the two people involved, or even the children who are created.
Their influence reaches children living nearby, as young minds seek out clues to appropriate sexual behavior. Deliberately creating motherless or fatherless families is not remotely in the interests of children or the community and benefits only a particular political agenda. But when homosexuals talk about marriage and monogamy, they mean something different from what folks usually mean. Evidence is overwhelming that few gay couples are stable, and those that are, have an understanding to have outside sexual contacts. Andrew Sullivan, the homosexual editor of The New Republic, concludes in his book, Virtually Normal, that homosexual relationships are quite different.