JD,
The financial aspect is one of the aspects I was talking about which has changed over time. I didn't say that the union of members of the opposite sex to create a family unit in which to raise children was the *sole* aspect of marriage, I said it was the one basic aspect which has never changed.
Also, regarding society benefiting from people forming the family unit and raising their children in it - It really isn't so much that society created marriage in order to get people to reproduce. People are going to reproduce no matter what. So, society isn't so much saying, "Get married in order to have children", but more like, "Since it is a given that children *are* going to be born in this society, we need a societal structure which will provide a safe and stable environment in which to raise them."
Marriage is also a legal contract, which clearly defines the specifical legal responsibilities and obligations of both sides. It is a way of protecting the rights of the children (for example, parents are legally responsible for feeding, clothing, and caring for their children), as well as the rights of the parents.
One of the saddest consequences of the welfare system which was in place in the US for many years, was that it discouraged marriage. The idea was that, if a woman had a man to provide for her, she didn't need welfare. Social servies would actually conduct inspections of the homes of welfare recipients, looking for signs that a man had been living there. Any indication that the woman had a husband, or even a boy friend, and the money was taken away. Of course, although the idea was that a woman with a man should eschew welfare, the reality was that many women took the welfare and eschewed the men. The consequences were devastating.
What does that have to do with same-sex marriage? I made my point at the bottom of my post to Rona. If we change the institution of marriage so that we are promoting the general idea that people should find someone to love and share their life with, then the institution of marriage ends up promoting something wonderful for the individual but of no particular benefit to the society. Marriage, as a societal institution, becomes meaningless. As we are starting to see in countries which have already changed the definition of marriage, when you make marriage meaningless, fewer people bother to get married. And I believe that will have serious consequences on society.
