Comment by krapp
3 years ago
All of this assumes that same-sex marriage has some effect on rate of reproduction or population growth, when it doesn't.
Notwithstanding the facts that marriage isn't necessary for sexual procreation and that LGBT people can and do procreate, if the primary interest of the state in regards to marriage was to define it in terms of procreation, then the greater concern by far should be heterosexual marriages which don't produce children and rates of divorce. Yet no one is attempting to argue that heterosexual married couples should be required by law to produce a child within, say, two years.
Also, there is a difference between government providing access to services which citizens can choose to avail themselves of, and government legislating reproduction directly. The government doesn't have "an interest in preventing children" in the case of providing access to abortion clinics, rather the interest there is providing access to medical care. The government isn't forcing anyone to have abortions. So the government banning gay marriage in the interest of "producing children," aside from not making any sense as described earlier, isn't a valid countercase to the government providing abortion access.
> there is a difference between government providing access to services which citizens can choose to avail themselves of, and government legislating reproduction directly.
Yes, and between those two extremes is the more modest approach of the government providing incentives for certain outcomes, while neither mandating nor preventing any particular actions by its citizens.
> the government banning gay marriage in the interest of "producing children,"
I don't know if anyone is suggesting that the government should "ban[] gay marriage", but some people think that the government shouldn't grant extra benefits to same-sex couples who declare themselves married in some ceremony.
As you point out, such a distinction made by a government is a very ineffective way to stimulate the production of children (indirectly through encouraging people into opposite-sex relationships), just as rewarding opposite-sex marriage doesn't guarantee the production of children, but a more rational set of policies (perhaps rewarding couples of any gender combination for cohabiting during the raising of children, whether naturally conceived or adopted) is more complicated to define and balance and integrate into the culture.
In any case, my point is still that governments have a legitimate interest to legislate policies that encourage an increase in the birth rate, even if they haven't found (or aren't even looking for) an optimal way to do that.