MORE ON GAY MARRIAGE
My reply to more of Tom Reasoner's arguments.  First, Reasoner has some interesting speculations on
 

If souls do exist in a Judeo-Christian sense, do they have a gender? Christians like to say that "all men are created equal". This could mean many things, though obviously it does not mean that all men (and women) are literally equal. It could mean that all people are physically human, or it could mean that all people have human minds and souls, or it could mean both. Are souls, then, equal, or is there some intrinsic difference between the souls of men and women? If there is no difference, that souls just happen to be attached to bodies with gender but don't actually have one themselves, then when two people bond spiritually, it is a genderless bond in the eyes of God. If this is the case, then homosexuals can be married in a spiritual sense.

 
Hmm.  This argument draws the imagination down some very interesting paths... which, however, I don't think I will follow.  Unlike Tom, I do believe in souls.  I don't know whether souls have gender or not, though I would suppose this would not reduce to a yes-or-no question.  On the one hand, gender is a characteristic so bound up with certain features of the physical body that it seems very odd for it to characterize a non-material entity such as the soul.  On the other hand, a soul must bear with it memory, experience, personality, to some degree, otherwise immortality of the soul becomes an abstract and almost meaningless idea-- and gender is sufficiently bound up with all those that it is difficult to imagine them continuing while gender was neutralized.  A thought-provoking but not (it seems to me) an especially threatening question.  Perhaps (to offer a "middle way") the soul does not have gender, but gender becomes one of its experiences, so that, just as people retain loyalties to universities and remain "Yale men" and "Domers" (Notre Dame students/alums) long after they graduate, so having been a man or woman in the earthly life will leave an imprint of memory on the soul after gender has passed away.  All this is pretty speculative, of course.
 
Is there marriage in the afterlife at all?  The Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection, once put to Jesus the question: if a woman married seven husbands, who died in succession, to which will she be married in the resurrection?  Jesus answered that "in heaven they are neither married nor given in marriage," and accordingly, Christian weddings use the words, "till death do us part."  This would be one of many arguments that would seem to refute Tom's conclusion that
 

The only perspective that would refute God's sactioning of gay marriage is the perspective of souls with gender matching precisely bodies with gender. If you happen to be one of the fringe cases, that's tough luck, life isn't fair (even though you're supposed to be as equal as others in the eyes of God).

 
Tom's other post on the subject approaches the issue in a more conventional way, familiar to Andrew Sullivan readers.  Here's an argument:
 

Most of the benefits [of marriage] only make sense in the context of a tight family structure. Why would Joe Blow, for instance, want to legally extend the benefits of his life and health insurance to Jane Doe? She would have to be one of the most important people in the world to him (or she would have to be extremely beautiful, and he extremely covetous and vain). As the law stands now, Joe Blow could propose to Jane Doe for shits and giggles, but Adam Twigs and John Berries can't share any benefits together (without tremendous work) even though they are the most important people in the world to each other.

 
The form of this argument is very typical of gay marriage advocates:
1) Tom presumes a rationale for the institution of marriage: "tight family structures" and that a spouse is "one of the most important people in the world" to someone.  (Tom's, notably and a bit unusually, makes no mention of sex, and so would seem to apply just as well to, say, brothers or cousins or war comrades or parents-and-children or any other people who want to forge "tight family structures" because they are "very important to" each other.)
2) Tom then compares gay and heterosexual marriage on the basis of the criteria he has constructed, and concludes that in some cases gay marriage could meet those criteria better than heterosexual marriage.
 
The problem with this is precisely that the reasons for the institution of marriage are too mysterious and elusive to be encapsulated in these kinds of formulations.  I don't think Tom's presumed rationale is adequate to justify the institution of marriage.  So why do we have the institution of marriage?  What rationale do I offer instead of Tom's?  I don't offer one.  Indeed, in terms of moral reasoning, I suspect that our society has gone far enough astray that I doubt the deepest reasons for marriage could be articulated with even the most minimal adequacy without a radical overhaul of our entire moral lexicon.  I aspire mostly to understand marriage in personal terms; to articulate it on a societal-legal level may well be a lost cause, for the moment at least. 
 
Perhaps this clarifies why I think radical innovation just now would be a mistake?  Suppose one of the switches in my house doesn't seem to turn anything on.  Maybe there's a problem, maybe not.  I go out to the fusebox to see if I can figure out what's the matter.  There are wires running everywhere, nothing is labeled, I have no idea what is what.  In this case, I'm better off just living with the dud light switch than jumping in and trying to reconnect everything in random ways, in which case I may do a lot of damage.  It's the same for gay marriage.