Are you seriously equating slavery (human right) with voting on definition of marriage (social construct)? Do you think being against brothers marrying their sisters also dead wrong?
> Human rights don't depend on how many people support them.
This is _absolutely_ true! However, the con 50% in this argument argued that "marriage as the union of M persons who X each other" (the pro side doesn't agree on what `M` and `X` should be) isn't a human right, but that "marriage as the union of two persons who are of the kind of persons that can procreate with each other" is. Only one side can be right as to what the basic human right is.
Marriage is a state sponsored contractual arrangement between two natural persons. It has nothing to do with procreation, gender or sexuality in terms of its state sponsored advantages.
Reference to the historical record shows that marriage in feudal times was a merger of families and was not practiced by those without economic power to protect.
My personal belief is that if any number of people wish to form a communal partnership for mutual benefit, they should be free to do so.
The government has chosen one particular arrangement, that of two individuals, and has pre-defined contractual rules regarding the mutual benefits, the protection of assets and of the results of pregnancy (ie children, inheritance etc) of either party to the contract.
It also imposes responsibilities on parties to that contract, in particular their responsibilities for those children.
Other laws, in particular, basic law, says that natural persons are, to quote one popular document, "are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights". That same basic law embodies the encapsulation of additional axioms, one of which is that "all people are equal under the law".
All of the rest of the "marriage debate" is irrelevant to the underlying legal situation.
And there we come down to the root of the issue - you define marriage as "a state-sponsored contractual arrangement between (at the moment) two natural persons". I define marriage as "a union of a man and a woman that establishes a family and which precedes, in time and in causality, the state". As I said, only one of us can be correct.
If law is the application of rightly-ordered reason to the task of achieving the common good (as I hold) then the _nature_ of marriage determines and limits what kinds of benefits, advantages, limits, and restrictions the state may place upon people. If I'm right, then what marriage and family _is_ matters a lot (and where we should focus our discussion). If we only care about marriage as an act of power carried out by those with the most capability for force, then obviously this is all academic and whatever happens is whatever happens and why get hot under the collar about it?
