Ah, and there are many families, that's why I said "technically" in my post. I was drawing off of Zyphlin's comment a few pages back about likening SSM to OSM, and what comes from them. You realize that a "family" consisting of two parents producing a child that contains the biological imprint from each parent is considered a technical family, whereby, should all that ever remain of an individual be genetic material, the parents of that individual could be identified. Families of animals of every other species on Earth are clearly tracable through their genetic material. It is only humans that have the power to consider a family something other than what nature does.
My point was that, SSM does not promote family in the technical sense, just like adoption doesn't. What it does do is complicate the natural order of the family, when leaving aside any material definition of family outside of what we biologically identify a family to be. Put it this way. As scientists are eagerly putting together the puzzle of human acenstory, they're tracking families, not by any other means than that of matching DNA, and the penetration and percent of that DNA within genomes. They can't tell if anyone was gay, or adopted or whatever, only that the familial ties that bind are, in themselves, unmistakable.
So, since this definition of what constitutes a family is ... Well, true, then what is your definition of a family? Is it a cultural definition, perhaps a manufactured definition out of some convienence that undoubtedly serves some political purpose? Can an adopted parent, gay, transexual, whatever person love their child, even though both parents do not share their DNA to produce the offspring? Of they can, but are they family? That's the point (I think) Zyphlin was making, and I agree.
As to my point about SSM proponents first making a mockery of marriage, and then now embracing the concept in terms of first and foremost being that of the best way to produce and raise children is laughable, inconsistent, and you, and CT, and many others are hypocrits for straddling the proverbial fence. My point about society, marriage, children is that OSM proponents have been making this rational argument for years, and it is dismissed, muddied by you folks, and diminished as unimportant to those that argue for equity in the law, yet, now that you seem confident that marriage rights are just around the corner, you are agreeing with those very same folks that clung to the "marriage is about children and raising them" argument, and that society has every right to protect that arrangement.
In short, you lack credibility!
Tim-