> You're expressing beliefs that others should have their rights taken away. That's unacceptable.

I don't agree with his viewpoint, but consider it from the other side.

There's two parts to marriage for a lot of people, and this gets overlooked. In the eyes of the law, marriage is a property arrangement, more or less. You get married, you merge assets, and you use your merged assets to fund your collective livelihoods and hopefully have some children. In the past, you could even take it as a given that across the middle class you would have a mother there to tend to the household economy (gardening, sewing, shopping, etc.) and tend to the children. The father would work a fairly predictable 9-5 job and basically, bring home the bacon. Sure this wasn't the case for everyone, but it was true enough across a vast swathe of the population for long enough that it came to shape the default expectations of our society. Probably it was really only the case for a few generations at most. Familial, social, and even religious ties held people together in a productive fashion.

Then things changed. Never mind why, the real reason why whatever it is doesn't even matter for this discussion, but things changed. Society isn't as stable as it seems, the middle class is shrinking, both parents tend to work now, etc. So the portion of society that could take for granted that their familial, social and religious ties would hold the very fabric of society, or at least their own county together worried that would no longer be the case. Everyone wants what is best for their kids and country, right?

So let's come back around to the second part of marriage: religious ceremony.

Atheists like you and I can freely dismiss that part of marriage, but for a long time, at least in Christian nations as I won't comment on other beliefs, the default view was that when you got married, you were bound in the eyes of God. There are a lot of people that still take that seriously, and it is easy to miss because atheists don't have to care about religious ceremony. Marriage is almost an artifact of the past other than the fact that a lot of our laws concerning property and tax codes are written with the assumption of marriage. Maybe we continue to get married simply because we as people are still so collectively locked in our ways that we still strive to make some kind of ceremony out of it.

Is it irrational that people still hold to that view so seriously though? I wouldn't argue, I mean, I don't have a religion for several reasons but those are besides the point. I think it's irrational, yet so many of the people that make up our society, really the foundation of our nation, hold to their beliefs so strongly, sincerely believe them that simply arguing that it is irrational is entirely besides the point. They have faith, traditions, a moral code, and beliefs that marriage is between One Man and One Woman and while the benefits and tax advantages bestowed upon husband and wife are nice, it is the civil portion, the property arrangement that is almost besides the point. They'll take it rather than leave it, but it isn't the foundation of their marriage.

Rewind a few years ago, and marriage wasn't a civil right that two gender conforming homosexual people had with each other. It was a right granted to them by either statute, constitutional amendment or in the end, a court order from on high from SCOTUS itself. A civil institution.

A civil, material institution treading upon matters spiritual. You don't have to agree, I don't have to agree, but the world I want to live in is one where people can express their viewpoints regardless of whether I agree or you agree or the masses agree. If social liberalism means anything anymore, I would want it to mean that. It is still important to understand that is only a civil rights issue for one side of this debate.