Fundamental, My Dear Iconoclast

"Marriage benefits society in many ways, not only by promoting mutuality and fidelity, but also by acknowledging an underlying biological complementarity which includes, for many, the possibility of procreation.
"The law should not seek to define away the underlying, objective, distinctiveness of men and women.  The Church has supported the removal of previous legal and material inequities between heterosexual and same-sex partnerships.  To change the nature of marriage for everyone will deliver no obvious additional legal gains to those already now conferred by civil partnerships."

Unassailable logic.  This, from the Church of England in response to an impending move by the current British government to legalize same-sex marriage.  According to the Anglican and Roman Catholic church leaders in Britain, this move will presage the most serious rift yet between church and state in centuries of controversial differences.

The Church points out that the safeguarding of rights for gay couples with the legalization of civil partnerships ensuring equal rights, what is there that gays hope to gain by access to same-sex marriage?  This is a covenant that has always, with good reason, been undertaken to ensure that children born of a physical union between a man and a woman, have legal status, and the expectation that two adults of opposite genders will raise them in security and emotional attachment.

For centuries the definition of the institution of marriage with a legal joining together in wedlock of a man and a woman prevailed to good effect.  This was society's assurance that order would prevail, that two responsible adults of different genders would populate society with their offspring.  The furtherance of the societal covenant itself was at stake.  The Church, in such matters, was seen as the final arbiter and protector of society's social values.

Much has changed since those times, with the emergence of a gay community no longer fearful of discrimination, oppression and violence, free to practise their version of affection and attachment toward someone of their own sex.  The circle of completing their human rights was achieved with the legal action to provide all the perquisites of entitlements through civil partnerships.  Yet, among the gay community there were those who were dissatisfied.

Reminiscent of a spoiled adolescent, who having achieved a recognition of emerging adulthood and trust that they will be responsibly independent, insisting that nothing whatever be denied them, irrespective of whether or not they are sufficiently emotionally mature to sustain their demands.  The gay community turned from being fearful and secretive to fiercely open and flamboyantly defiant.

Insisting that nothing, no custom or social event fashioned for any specific group be closed to them.  As an institution, matrimony made good sense to join a man an a woman in a life of familial aspirations.  As an institution it makes no sense whatever to extend the custom to include two males or two females in wedlock. 

Releasing the once-specific social covenant to members of the same sex trivializes and and makes an absurd mockery of the institution, with women naming themselves 'husbands' in a union, and men considering themselves 'wives' in their unions.  Their biology has spurned the 'normal'. Yet they seek through social manipulation to emulate what they have spurned.

And transgendered females calling upon an intact womb to provide them, as males, with children.

It's a wonky world.