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Yes, but as pointed out elsewhere on the thread, that argument is seemingly defeated by any system which allows provably infertile people to marry one another. If you allow that, then you've allowed the expansion of the right to marry to inevitably-childless couples, and withholding it from homosexual couples is just haggling over price.
This is the classical example of exception proving the rule. Let's take another example of a state supported institution - incorporation into limited liability and other companies. The institution is there to support businesses, which are formed to pursue profit. The upside for the society is economic dynamism. Everybody understands, that there are unsuccessful businesses which fail to fulfil the imperative. Nevertheless it does not mean that the institution is without merit.
And it for sure does not mean, that just because there are some failed businesses, the whole institution should be hollowed out, because it is a "discrimination" that people cannot create companies for other things - such as group of bros creating a company in order to drink every Friday, which they can write off from their taxes.
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Marriage originated in a time when it was virtually impossible for medical science to tell ahead of time that someone was infertile. The only way to know was if a spouse proved unable to conceive after several years, and such was grounds for an annulment (a document saying the marriage was never valid in the first place).
That said, if you want to redefine modern marriage to exclude people who are provably infertile in advance, I'm all for it.
This is to large extent already happening, as the institution was hollowed out for decades, many people especially secularists are now questioning the meaning of marriage altogether, as they realize that all these Disney stories about love don't make sense. Nobody needs a paper from government certifying that two people love each other, especially if it is extremely easy to get a divorce and secularists are raving about and supporting "alternative families" anyways. The societal advantages are evaporating every year, less and less people care if somebody is married or not, with or without children. Every year, there is less social stigma but in turn marriage also has less support from communities.
Modern secular marriage is something akin to cargo cult, an idea running on vapors, mimicking the outside appearance of something that worked in the past. I think this was also the main drive behind gay marriages - they wanted to leech off of the legitimacy and high status of the institution in order to normalize their lifestyles. As with everything, each action has a reaction and all these things changed the institution itself. I am not solely blaming gay marriages for this, the trend began long before that, but legalizing same sex marriages kind of hammered the idea home - do you really want to be in a marriage club with gays and weirdos running various marriage frauds?
As of now the marriage only make sense in religious communities, where it retains its inherent meaning, purpose and where it is seen as sacrament with sacred vows and everything. The differences are stark enough compared to modern secular marriage, that it should probably get a new name.
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Yes, but that just means that definition is obsolete — as science and medicine evolve, the law must evolve with them, no?
I don’t see why that follows. The old law could be perfectly good for humans as it stands, and trying to make adaptations for improved science and medicine could wind up making the law worse.
It is a tough sell to assume that the old law, made with incomplete information, was accidentally so perfect that attempts to improve it with more complete information are going to make it worse.
Without getting into the specific issue here (marriage):
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If requested - but it did not, to my knowledge, equal an annulment in the sense of an infertile marriage being deemed to have no legal value. I've never heard of a third party suing to break up a couple's marriage against their will by seeking to prove that one or both of them were infertile. (I'd be genuinely curious to know if that did ever happen anywhere, but even if it did, I would remain skeptical that this was a broadly-understood principle as opposed to a weird legal loophole.)
This is at least coherent, and I would find it more respectable than the status quo ante. That being said, I doubt you'd get much of a constituency for it even among normie conservatives. It smacks of Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering, and at the human level it'd be fundamentally counterintuitive to say that infertile people can't get married even though people who become infertile can trivially stay married.
(And the same standard would, of course, raise further questions. With rapid advancement in medical science, how definitively can we assert that a currently infertile couple won't be able to use IVF in 10 years using some funky CRISPR stem-cell wizardry? But then by the same token, can we really rule out IVF for homosexual couples as a real possibility within the lifetimes of gay couples currently seeking marriage? For lesbians at least, to set aside the surrogacy problem for M/M couples.)
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