The First Stone

...“romantic marriage” was invented by heterosexuals, and the detachment of sex from marriage and marriage from kinship was accomplished long before anyone began seriously proposing gay marriage. Gay marriage may further damage marriage; but heterosexuals damaged marriage nearly beyond recognition all on our own.

Not news. Nietzsche pointed all this out more than a century ago:

The entire West has lost those instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which the future grows: perhaps nothing goes so much against the grain of its 'modern spirit' as this. One lives for today, one lives very fast - one lives very irresponsibly: it is precisely this which one calls 'freedom'. That which makes institutions institutions is despised, hated, rejected: whenever the word 'authority' is so much as heard one believes oneself in danger of a new slavery. The décadence in the valuating instinct of our politicians, our political parties, goes so deep that they instinctively prefer that which leads to dissolution, that which hastens the end ... Witness modern marriage. It is obvious that all sense has gone out of modern marriage: which is, however, no objection to marriage but to modernity. The rationale of marriage lay in the legal sole responsibility of the man: marriage thereby had a centre of gravity, whereas now it limps with both legs. The rationale of marriage lay in its indissolubility in principle: it thereby acquired an accent which could make itself heard against the accidents of feeling, passion and the moment. It lay likewise in the responsibility of the families for the selection of mates. With the increasing indulgence of love matches one has simply eliminated the foundation of marriage, that alone which makes it an institution. One never establishes an institution on the basis of an idiosyncrasy, one does not, as aforesaid, establish marriage on the basis of 'love' - one establishes it on the basis of the sexual drive, the drive to own property (wife and child considered as property), the drive to dominate which continually organizes the smallest type of domain, the family, which needs children and heirs so as to retain, in a physiological sense as well, an achieved measure of power, influence, wealth, so as to prepare for protracted tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already includes in itself the affirmation of the largest, the most enduring form of organization: if society as a whole cannot stand security for itself to the most distant generations, then marriage has really no meaning. - Modern marriage has lost its meaning - consequently it is being abolished.