Tom Meyer and Tommy De Seno: You were answered in subsequent main-feed posts because I wrote those posts with the feedback from previous posts in mind. You should be able to connect the dots.

It's not inconsistent, it just isn't coherent. Just as it isn't inconsistent to say marriage is a relationship between blue-eyed men and blond women born on Tuesdays. But what's the reason for so defining it?

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see that--it wasn't in your posts where you answered the 5 questions, and I thought those were the posts you were asking for a response to. 
In response I'd just say that the definition you offer is ad hoc--why those features rather than others--apart from the traditional understanding of marriage as a comprehensive union of sexually complementary spouses. It is parasitical on that understanding in a way that couldn't withstand challenges, as today's post shows honest advocates of redefining marriage admitting.

Tommy De Seno's responses to the five questions have already been answered, so I don't understand why he persisits in requesting a direct response.

I've posted a new main-feed post that I think addresses the claims made by Tom Meyer. But one specific comment. Tom never answered the question of what marriage is, he just said he's in favor of redefining it to include same-sex relationships: " I have no problem with society drawing lines that may be slightly unfair to a handful of people. My argument, like most conservative SSM proponents, is that widening the marriage franchise to include homosexual couples would be a net benefit to society, largely because it would encourage bourgeois values among gays."   I don't think it would do that--for the reasons cited in today's post--but I also would note that even if it would encourage bourgeois values, it still is non-responsive to the question of what sets marriage apart from other relationships.  The rest of Tom's points stand or fall on this one.

If anyone feels there was a particularly important comment from this post or any previous post that has gone unaddressed, please feel free to repost it, or link to it here, and I'll respond.

Yesterday's and today's comments are fascinating. Amongst certain commentators, marriage is simply whatever sort of interpersonal relationship consenting adults—be they two or ten in number—want it to be; sexual or platonic; sexually exclusive or open, temporary or permanent.

If that’s right, it sure does sound like the abolition of marriage. Marriage is left with no essential features, no fixed core as a social reality—it is simply whatever consenting adults want it to be.

If that’s right, how can redefining marriage for public purposes to include same-sex relationships be a civil right? A demand of justice? A matter of basic fairness and equality? From the infinite variety of interpersonal consensual relationships that adults can form, why should the state pick out same-sex ones?

Today’s post explained why the state recognizes real marriages—conjugal unions of a man and woman ordered to childbearing and rearing. Yet some, thinking marriage has no form and serves no social purpose, want to get the government out of the marriage business.

If that’s right, how will government protect children—the prime victim of our non-marital sexual culture—without growing more intrusive and more expensive?

Yesterday's and today's comments are fascinating. Amongst certain commentators, marriage is simply whatever sort of interpersonal relationship consenting adults—be they two or ten in number—want it to be; sexual or platonic; sexually exclusive or open, temporary or permanent.

If that’s right, it sure does sound like the abolition of marriage. Marriage is left with no essential features, no fixed core as a social reality—it is simply whatever consenting adults want it to be.

If that’s right, how can redefining marriage for public purposes to include same-sex relationships be a civil right? A demand of justice? A matter of basic fairness and equality? From the infinite variety of interpersonal consensual relationships that adults can form, why should the state pick out same-sex ones?

Today’s post explained why the state recognizes real marriages—conjugal unions of a man and woman ordered to childbearing and rearing. Yet some, thinking marriage has no form and serves no social purpose, want to get the government out of the marriage business.

If that’s right, how will government protect children—the prime victim of our non-marital sexual culture—without growing more intrusive and more expensive?

Yes, I'll be taking up those questions--and responses.

I'd still like to hear from people who favor redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships: What is marriage?

I'm with Mollie, would like to hear some answers to the questions; at the very least to the simple question: what is marriage?

But in the meantime, I'd like to respond to sloppy appeals to social science. Some on this thread have followed in the footsteps of Judge Vaughn Walker. In the case that overturned Proposition 8, he declared that “children raised by gay or lesbian parents are as likely as children raised by heterosexual parents to be healthy, successful and well-adjusted. The research supporting this conclusion is accepted beyond serious debate in the field of developmental psychology.”

Loren Marks reviewed all 59 studies that the APA relied on in its brief embracing the conclusion that there are “no differences” in outcomes for children from same-sex parenting. Marks’s conclusion:

Not one of the 59 studies referenced…compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married parents and their children. The available data, which are drawn primarily from small convenience samples, are insufficient to support a strong generalizable claim either way.

So much for a conclusion “accepted beyond serious debate.”

That's easy. By not getting them any more wrong than we already have. No-fault divorce was a mistake. Eliminating sexual complementarity would be too.

There wasn't data back then; it's a conceptual question. Which is why I phrased it that way:

Those who had been leading the marriage movement for decades had to ask themselves: Would recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages strengthen the marriage culture, or weaken it?

They saw that redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships was not ultimately about expanding the pool of people eligible to marry. Redefining marriage was about cementing a new idea of marriage in the law—an idea whose baleful effects they had spent years fighting. That idea—that romantic-emotional union is all that makes a marriage—couldn’t explain or support the stabilizing norms that make marriage fitting for family life. It could only undermine those norms.

Thanks, Rachel. There are lots of good pieces on this at Public Discourse.  Also see: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/10/6784/ and http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/10/6786/  and http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/11/6758/

Thanks, Mollie.  We cite that, among others, in our book.

Thanks for the great comments. Subsequent posts this week will take up the questions about what marriage is, what the harms of redefining marriage might be, and whether monogamy, permanence, and sexual exclusivity are objective demands of same-sex relationships—and whether LGBT activists embrace them. These themes are discussed at length in my book, What Is Marriage? 

Here I just want to bring the conversation back to the point of this post, which is to situate the debate over redefining marriage in the broader context of marriage. Is this the right framework for thinking about the question? Some propose frameworks of LGBT rights or equality. I think those obscure the point. Tomorrow we’ll come to the topic of what is marriage more directly.

One word on no-fault divorce. The point of raising the issue isn’t to litigate here  a better divorce policy. Rather, it’s to show that law shapes culture, culture shapes behavior, and behavior results in human flourishing or suffering. Changes in marriage law will change the way people behave, in unexpected ways, for better or worse—which is why we have reason to want the state to get marriage right.