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  • Most advocates of same-sex marriage emphasize rights and freedom, rather than lifelong and exclusive commitment.4
  • Advocates view marriage as a contract, which people are free to break (albeit, at some cost).5 In fact, materials produced by the Love Makes a Family coalition6 complain of same-sex partners being denied the benefits of divorce statutes! One recent editorial endorsing same-sex marriage noted with approval the trend in the law to treat marriages "far more like business partnerships than the joining of two souls." (Is this where we're headed?)

4 Sexual relationships among homosexual men tend not to be marked by durability or by fidelity to one partner. "D.P. McWhirter and A.M. Mattison (The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop . . . [1984]) found that of the 156 couples in their study, none of the relationships that lasted more than five years was monogamous, and only seven couples in the study were maintaining exclusivity . . .. Hickson et al. confirm this finding in relation to their more recent British study ('Maintenance of Open Gay Relationships,' p. 412)." Thomas E. Schmidt, Straight and Narrow: Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexuality Debate, n. 40, Ch. 6 ("The Price of Love"), InterVarsity Press 1995.
5"The duty to keep a contract at common law means a prediction that you must pay damages if you do not keep it, - and nothing else." Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Path of The Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 462 (1897). In contract law, moral considerations seldom play a part in the assessment of damages.
6According to the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union (CCLU), in 1999 "CCLU and the CT Coalition for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Civil Rights (CCLGBTCR) convened a meeting of the core team from 1999 [that had successfully opposed defense-of-marriage legislation]. It was determined that we would start a new coalition, the Love Makes a Family Coalition (LMF), to work on three things: 1. Passage of co-parent adoption legislation 2. Passage of Domestic Partnership Arbitration Award and Legislation, and 3. Defeating any Connecticut Defense of Marriage Amendments (DOMAs) . . .."

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