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Or file an official form stating that they objected to doing so.
However, the Federal Government would then work with the insurance providers to fill the resulting gap, and some groups wanted to be able to opt out, not only of paying for their employees' contraception, but of anyone covering the cost!
...the 'socially progressive' view being that, the arguments against equal marriage all being rooted in their proponents' metaphysical assumptions, and the imposition of metaphysical beliefs by state power having spilt rivers of blood in 17th-century Europe (more recent to the Founding Fathers than the Civil War is to today), the official elevation of opposite-gender couples over same-gender couples cannot be justified as government policy. (I wonder if 'state government issues Civil Unions for all couples, leaves marriage to whatever church/other religious organisation/other private entity the participants see fit to involve' would have been accepted.)
The reasoning behind that being that they considered it the equivalent of the installers of these water fountains claiming, per some guff about the Curse of Ham or Hex of Corned Beef or Jinx of Turkey or whatever, a Conscientious Objection to letting [hexagrammaton]s use the same water fountain as white people, or a separate but actually equal one off the same production line.
There are many secular arguments for elevating opposite sex marriages. One of the better ones defines marriage as an institution primarily aimed to form families and raise children. It is because of this social good that marriage is elevated, and it gives the couple certain benefits. Marriage is not a certificate that two people love each other and its primary function is not tax benefits or shiny paper or anything like that. This intuitive family/children connection is also behind the fact, that it is not possible to marry your parent or your sibling.
To which the inevitable reply is that, okay, then where's the law banning infertile people from marrying? Because on the axis of "family formation," there's no difference between them and the gays, is there? To ban gays from marrying on the grounds they cannot produce children, but not similarly ban straight couples who cannot produce children, would clearly be anti-gay discrimination.
Now, I have my own secular, philosophical argument against this, complete with toy analogy, that I've posted here before, about teleology in an imperfect, entropic universe. (But I'll admit that sort of Aristotelian thinking is pretty far from most mainstream thought.)
As mentioned below, there are actually laws saying that some people couldn't marry unless they could show that they were infertile. Your entire frame of reference simply does not make sense, and you need a pretty significant perspective change.
Further, rather than there being "no difference", there is actually quite a huge difference, particularly in terms of intrusiveness to privacy. The government can very very simply look at the government documents which state that they're the same sex. What kind of standards, and what kind of intrusive nightmare would it be to require something like proof of fertility? @WandererintheWilderness would call it "Chinese-style authoritarian social engineering". These examples are worlds apart rather than being "no different".
It's not my perspective — as you'd note if you'd read the part I'd linked — it's just the most common counter-argument the pro-gay-marriage side presents.
What doesn't make sense about it? If you are saying the line between who can marry and who cannot, which puts gay couples on the "cannot" side, is drawn on the grounds of who can produce children and who cannot — that you're barring gay couples because they're non-reproducing rather than because they're gay — then the line has to be drawn between (straight) couples who can reproduce and couples, straight or gay, who cannot.
People made the "privacy" argument you made here, back when the debate was live. The first answer was that age is just as legible to the government "in terms of intrusiveness to privacy" as sex, and yet we let 70-year-old straight couples get married, despite being just as clearly not about producing children as in the case of gay couples.
(My reply to this is my linked argument about teleology, and "inherent" versus "accidental" characteristics in regard to such teleological orientations.)
The other is the argument (a much better one, IMO) that differences in the intrusiveness to enforce a rule between groups do not justify enforcing the rule unequally. Just because it's easier to enforce a ban against gay couples marrying than it is against infertile straight couples without massive state intrusion does not, under modern anti-discrimination law, make it acceptable or non-discriminatory to enforce it in a discriminatory matter, let alone set down such discriminatory enforcement in the law itself. If the rule is "too intrusive to enforce" against a particular group, then it can't be enforced, or a rule, at all.
This "if" is precisely what my example points out is not true. The entire premise of the argument is simply false. The entire frame of reference simply does not make sense. Basically the entire remainder of this comment is sort of pointless from the get-go because of this flaw.
Well then, if the line between who should be allowed to marry isn't about who can produce children, then what is it about? What is the difference that justifies, in purely secular, non-religious terms, treating gay couples differently than straight ones?
Again, the perspective change needs to be pretty deep. It is not about who is "allowed" to marry. It's about what the State is trying to encourage/discourage. Think about the example I gave; see if you can come up with an idea for what it is that they're trying to do.
Speak fucking plainly. No, I'm not going to guess "what it is that they were trying to do" (note the past tense). You tell me exactly what you think the early 21st Century American government (with no-fault divorce, and civil rights and anti-discrimination law for LGB) was "trying to encourage/discourage"; why it's legitimate for them to encourage/discourage; how not legalizing gay marriage both works toward the end goal of that encouragement/discouragement, and is a constitutionally and legally valid means (because in American constitutional law, the US government is limited in the means it may use to secure even good and valid ends, with a number of judicial "tests" and levels of restriction depending on the importance of the ends and the nature of the means) of doing so.
Your continued mix of obtuseness, vaguery, and missing-the-point in this thread have been so frustrating, they've got me defending a position and argument I don't even believe myself here. There's a reason the sorts of arguments you're vaguely-gesturing-toward-but-not-actually-making lost the fight.
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