Jonathan RauchThinkers

Polygamy is not in the state's interest insofar as monogamous marriage results in significant improvements in child welfare, including lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death, homicide and intra-household conflict.

Polygamy is a societal system which, lacking the cultural advantage of the more egalitarian distribution of women, shows significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault robbery and fraud.

Polygamy is antithetical to liberal democracy. In fact, it's abolition, in effect, democratized the opportunity to marry, thus providing a critical step toward modern liberal democracy and egalitarian social structures.

Same-sex marriage is beneficial to society in that it (I) offers a stable environment for children, (ii) helps young couples settle down into a household (iii) greatly expands the number of future elderly caregivers, since partners tend to become one another's primary caregivers in old age.

Same-sex marriage is good for society in that it acts as a stabilizing force insofar as marriage entangles a couple both legally and socially such that divorce becomes a complicated, wrenching, and a real deterrent to breaking up.

Same-sex marriage is, in fact, a protection of the institution of marriage in that it promotes the idea that it is good for society to have people durably attached in a formally recognized manner.

Same-sex marriage is, in fact, important to preserving the broader institution of marriage, which, like democracy and capitalism is important in meeting personal and societal needs.

Same-sex marriage is in no way a slippery slope because there is no reasonable justification to the clamin that if gay marriage is a fundamental right, so to must polygamy be: They are fundamentally different matters with a host of different concerns.

Same-sex marriage is lawful in that its opponents have been unable to meet the rational-bias test (i.e. To show how the law banning marriage is related to a legitimate government purpose) and that these cases involve anything other than the rights of two consenting adults whose marriages would pose no risk of harm to themselves or third parties.

Same-sex marriage is legitimate insofar as its opponents fail to meet the low bar of the rational-bias test... that is, they are unable to explain how preventing gay couples from marrying serves any of the state's claimed goals, nor were they able to show any plausible harm from gay marriage.

Same-sex marriage is no exception to and thus should be viewed in line with the long-established preference in human communities for more marriage over less since marriage acts as a powerful stabilizing force, serving to channel trouble-making libido into societally useful forms.

Same-sex marriage is not analogous to polygamy in that polygamy is, entirely unlike same-sex couples, harmful to society in that the system places women in competition with other wives and can reduce them all to satellites of the man.

Same-sex marriage is not analogous to polygamy in that polygamy is, entirely unlike same-sex couples, harmful to society in that, being a system where high-status men (in almost all cases men) horde wives, it creates an uneven distribution of total marriage partners, thus denying lower-status men access to life's most stabilizing and civilizing institution which results in higher incidences of behaviors like crime and violence.

Same-sex marriage is not analogous to polygamy in that same-sex marriage stabilizes society by expanding the stabilizing forces of marriage to more individuals whereas polygamy destabilizes society by limitting access to women to a few high-status individuals and thus denying the institutions stabilizing forces to many.

Same-sex marriage is not any more analogous to polygamy than saying there's no reason to oppose date rape or securities fraud once gay couples can marry.

Same-sex marriage is not equivalent to polygamy. It is its opposite. By allowing high-status men to hoard wives at the expense of lower-status men, polygamy withdraws the opportunity to marry from people who now have it... same-sex marriage, by contrast, extends the opportunity to marry to people who now lack it.

Same-sex marriage is often argued against with bad faith slippery slope arguments that are not tenable because they do not follow any good faith slope but are instead entire deviations that have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Same-sex marriage is not to be supported as the arguments given in its favor offer no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not.

Same-sex marriage is argued with reasoning that would seem to apply equally to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.

Same-sex marriage is in fact supported with the argument that the state is concerned with marriage because it is concerned with the production of children. If this is the case, one would do well to recognize that same-sex couples have children (through such means as insemination, adoption, and previous marriages) and raise them in their households.