Whenever my friends and I get into a discussion or friendly debate over the merits (or lack thereof) of gay marriage, the arguments they put forth in favor are always pretty much the same:

* Half of heterosexual marriages end in divorce, so what’s the big difference?
* Why get hung up on sexual orientation? Better to have a child grow up in a loving same-sex household than a unhappy heterosexual union or one with only one parent;
* As long as its between consenting adults, what right does the government have to tell people how they should live?

And somewhere in the discussion, I’ll usually come back at them and say, OK, let’s say we allow any two people to marry or enter into a legal union, why stop there? Would you allow three or four people to do the same? At which point, they’ll usually fall back on the argument about unions of two people max being ideal, or better than one, or something along those lines, but to me that’s intellectually disingenuous.

The fact is, once you open the gates to “marriage” or “civil unions” between same-sex couples, it’s a very slippery slope to every out-there activist organization pushing their own bizarre agendas and employing the ACLU to sue for changing the law in their favor. After all, in a free and open society, why not three-person marriages or unions? Or four? Or ten? Or should there be a limit, and if so, why? How about unions with cars or trees? Or unions with animals? (My wife would like that – then she could leave most of her money to her rabbits instead of me! Just kidding, of course, but you get my drift…)

Don’t believe me? streiff at Red State notes that last week, no less than the esteemed Washington Post ran on concurrent days stories sympathetic to non-traditional relationships involving people seeking to hop onto the same-sex marriage argument that gay, lesbian, and transgender activists have been pushing without success over the last few electoral cycles as a way to further their own agendas. He writes:

For those who have ridiculed us traditionalists whenever we raise the usually disreputable “slippery slope” argument in the defense of marriage as understood by most cultures over several millennia these articles should serve as evidence that we are not exaggerating. When viewed through the mawkishly distorted prism of the arguments proffered by proponents of homosexual marriage their particular cases are compelling and if we accept the idea of marriage as some amorphous “human right” they are irrefutable.

My guess is that it’s just the Post’s way of firing its first salvo at soon-to-be-former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a Mormon who is keen to enter the 2008 Presidential sweepstakes, but you never know how these things can all of a sudden take off and become such a hot topic in the mainstream dino-media and the cable news channels that the idea actually begins to gain legitimacy.

To me it’s all ridiculous, and just another way the Progressive Left is trying to tear down anything that smacks of the basic fabric that holds this country and society together. Watch them try and turn gay marriage, and then polygamy, into a “civil rights” issue, invoking the ghost of Rosa Parks to try and put their pathetic warped agenda across. What they really want is Rome, and hopefully, more and more states will follow the dozen-plus states who have passed constitutional amendments limiting marriage to that between one man and one woman.

For this country to do anything less is to court both societal and legal chaos and disaster.