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Especially in the US there are probably a lot of people who would rather blame lizard people than face the reality that their own ideology is at fault. You can't have complete separation between church and state while the state enforces Christian morality. Much of the American right clings to the constitution and libertarian ideas while wanting society to enforce their morality.
If the state is supposed to be not involved in religion, who says gays can't marry?
The state because there is no state interest in a homosexual couple. State marriage only exists to manage procreative couplings. That it is not narrowly tailored doesn't matter. Also the state has other strong interests in deterring homosexuality.
But infertile opposite-sex couples could always get married...?
Such as...?
I have a pet analogy I've been using for over a decade on this point, and I recently encountered a term that helps better encapsulate what said analogy is gesturing toward: "ordered toward"
Consider hand grenades. Then consider a movie prop "grenade" that looks like the real thing, but isn't. The law treats those two things very differently, and for a clear and obvious reason: real grenades explode, fake movie props don't.
But, one might argue, some subset of "real" grenades are "duds": due to manufacturing defects, the effects of time, or whatever, don't explode when you release the spoon. But the law makes no effort to carefully identify and separate out the duds, to be classed with the movie props as "non-explosive" — instead, it classifies them with the fully-functional grenades. Therefore, the law can't actually be about "explosive vs. non-explosive," and the line drawn between real and movie-prop grenades is illegitimate and should be removed.
Of course, most people would likely reject this argument. The key is precisely the phrase I spoke of before: ordered toward. A real grenade is ordered toward exploding — even if, thanks to our living in an imperfect, entropic universe, some subset fall short of that purpose — while a movie prop is not ordered toward exploding. For a "dud" grenade, the "non-explosiveness" is incidental, accidental. For the look-alike movie prop, the non-explosiveness is inherent.
In short, this is an argument that teleology can constitute a valid "joint" upon which reality may be "cleaved," particularly when it comes to law.
(It continues to dismay me how many secular people firmly accept the creationist philosophical principle that "purpose" requires a conscious purpose-giver, when an important element of the theory of evolution by natural selection is that it provides an explanation of how an undirected, atelic process can produced directed, telic entities. The usual rejoinder people make, when I argue this, is to conflate the process of natural selection with the products of natural selection; which, as I like to say, is like confusing tennis shoes with a tennis shoe factory.)
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