They want approval of that whatever it is they they think they should have granted to them as something from on high.

I don't care if you want to marry a toaster. What is the point? Why do you (piece of organic shit that you are) need a writ of something or other from the state to verify your love?

Tell the state to go fuck itself and mind it's own business and you will have so much more respect from me. Until then, fuck you and fuck every thing you think I owe you.

They want approval of that whatever it is they they think they should have granted to them as something from on high.

I don't care if you want to marry a toaster. What is the point? Why do you (piece of organic shit that you are) need a writ of something or other from the state to verify your love?

Tell the state to go fuck itself and mind it's own business and you will have so much more respect from me. Until then, fuck you and fuck every thing you think I owe you.

is it premature or short-sighted to see essays like this as a capitulation to the inevitability of same-sex marriage?

I don't want to marry “womankind,” I want to marry a *specific* woman.

That, on the average, men are different than women is no more interesting than the fact that tall people, on the average, are different than short people. Is there some DEEP TRUTH about short vs. tall people that should make us insist on them marrying only other, within-height (or “opposite” height) persons?

Really, these arguments are equally dumb. (Also, have you seen people of very different heights having sex? Talk about icky!)

…

Of course suggesting that the legal privileges of conventional marriage should be eliminated would be even more of a losing proposition politically than pushing for equality of same sex marriage, despite the fact that many aspects of the actual existing legal framework of marriage clearly represent the state favouring certain lifestyle choices (conventional same sex marriage child rearing) through the tax system and in many other policy areas.

If we recognize that the existing political reality is that the way the state treats marriage is already expressing a legally enshrined moral judgement about which lifestyle choices the state encourages then it seems an uninteresting battle to a libertarian whether that group of privileged choices should be arbitrarily expanded to include same sex unions but not, say, polygamous unions or lifelong bachelor lifestyles.

I have no particular objection to the formal recognition of the union of a same sex couple but I'm not clear why I should particularly support their right to special favourable treatment under the tax code compared to a heterosexual couple who choose to remain unmarried or someone who through choice or circumstance is living alone.

It's also worth noting that it is not “illegal discrimination” to say that there are meaningful differences between men and women. Who's denying that men are convex and women are concave? As you rightly note, the question is whether those differences are *morally relevant*.