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I think that the division might be better described, not as 'religious' vs. 'secular' so much as 'metaphysical' vs. 'material'. Material assertions can be settled empirically¹, whereas metaphysical debates are often predicated on diverging axioms, and thus, if placed as support for state policy, tend to lead to bloodshed; the most salient example to the authors of the Bill of Rights being the European Wars of Religion in the XVII Century. The disputants in that example being competing religious institutions led to the principle being phrased in terms of 'separation of church and state'.
To take a different example, imagine two opponents of a nuclear power plant. Alice claims that it will release a metric arse-load of radiation every hour it operates, exposure to the tiniest bit of which will cause eleventy-hundred million cancer deaths; Bob asserts that splitting atoms is a contravention of the natural order, and making human existence easier and less precarious by the provision of abundant energy is an impermissible defiance of the Will of Gaia. Alice's claims can be refuted by measuring the radiation levels outside and inside existing reactor sites with a Geiger Counter, and referring to the health statistics of the inhabitants of Ramsar and Karunagappalli². Bob's argument, however, rests on assumptions (the existence of a natural order which does not include human-built technology; the notion of a personified environment rightfully possessed of an authority outweighing human well-being) which are not amenable to testing by experiment or observation¹, and therefore can only either
(a.) be set aside as not legitimate groundings for state policy (hence 'separation of church and state'), or
(b.) be decided on the battlefield.
The Protestant and Catholic churches in early-modern Europe chose the latter, and caused such devastation, for so little gain, that even fourteen decades later, people knew that allowing the sword of the state to be wielded on behalf of metaphysical assumptions is playing with fire.
¹cf. Newton's Flaming Laser Sword: "What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating."
²Locations in Iran and India with high levels of background radiation and no obvious increase in cancer rates.
The 'secular' arguments I have seen for state non-recognition of same-gender marriage while recognising opposite-gender marriage³ include arguments based on 'complementarity of male and female' (not religious in the narrow sense of "God/the Church/Scripture says so"; nevertheless metaphysical in nature), and arguments relating to parenthood, (entirely material, but do not support discrimination between same-gender couples and opposite-gender couples one or both members of which is entirely infertile.)
If you know of any other secular arguments for the proposition that the state ought to distinguish between 'two men' and 'one man whose testicles have been disconnected and one woman who ran out of eggs ten years ago', I am willing to consider them.
³As opposed to the arguments that the state shouldn't involve itself in marriage at all.
I'd phrase it more as "Do not impose your religious beliefs on people who do not share them."; or as it was put in the 2000s, "Don't tell me I can't have cake because you happen to be on a diet."
Interestingly, many states had laws on the books that some people couldn't marry unless they showed that they were infertile. Namely, close relatives.
This has been trod over time and time again, but people still draw on this silly argument.
Do not impose your atheistic beliefs on people who do not share them.
I don't follow how the first sentence leads to the second.
No one's asking religious people who are against gay marriage to get gay-married against their will.
What do you think the purpose of such laws is?
I think this debate would go rather better if you told me.
Possibly. Possibly not. I'm not really viewing it as a "debate". I'm just encouraging you to think about things. It would be nice to get your perspective on how you think about it. Perhaps it's something you've never thought about before; it would then be useful to get your fresh perspective on the matter rather than simply treating it as a "debate" to be "won", because that often leads to people simply trying to shove things into a pre-canned bin where they think they can just draw from their pre-canned set of talking points. So far, I think it's apparent that you don't have a simple pre-canned talking point for this, specifically, so it's useful to get your first impressions concerning the brute fact of such laws.
I'll note that I'm not treating it as a debate to be won but as a debate whose shared purpose is to arrive at the truth.
But alright - humoring you: I don't, in fact, believe that marriage laws historically existed as social-engineering policies intended to encourage the creation of heterosexual families. As a broad simplification, I think that a critical mass of a given human population will be inclined to pair up into heterosexual households anyway, and the law eventually started keeping track of who's shacked up with who for a variety of administrative purposes (like settling inheritance disputes between a bereaved partner and the blood family of the deceased).
Only at a secondary stage did social engineers and moralizing busybodies realize that, once legal marriage became the norm, they could gatekeep it as a way to police who fucked whom and on what terms, whether based on their subjective ick-factors, or on their clever notions about the greater good of the nation. "By default any man/woman pair who ask for it can be legally married, but we will deny it to couples that could produce inbred children with defects in the hope that that'll make them give up on fucking one another at all" is a policy you get if you start from "everyone who's liable to shack up together in practice should get a rubber-stamped piece of paper regularizing that status", and only secondarily try to prevent unions that will be actively deleterious to society. I don't think it's a policy you get if you start from "we need to encourage fertile heterosexuals to shack up and make babies and raise them to adulthood" and come up with marriage licenses as an incentive, because if "number of fertile families" is your success metric rather than "number of people who'd have fucked anyway whose status is now regularized", it would be much cleaner to simply ban all potentially-inbreeding cousins from marrying than to carve out exceptions for infertile cousins.
(To be clear, I am making a kind of Rousseau or Thomas Hobbes "deriving the current state of affairs from a frictionless spherical state of nature" argument, not historical claims about a real sequence of events. This is only a model. But I think it's a model with greater explanatory power than "marriage was invented to boost demographics".)
What about the bit about letting them marry if they show that they're infertile?
I think this comes naturally out of the very sentence you quoted. Say Alice and Bob ask to get married: the legal clerk will look into their application and say "but hang on, it says here you're cousins. if you fuck each other, it could create inbred babies, which is bad. you're more likely to fuck if I accept your request than if I reject it. therefore, I should refuse", and then Bob will say "hold your horses, Padre, my balls got cut off years ago in a tragic fencing accident", and this eliminates the problem, causing the clerk to revert to the default policy of "they asked for a marriage therefore they should get one".
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