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Allowing gay marriage would cause a number of other principles surrounding marriage to come under attack
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- Adam Kolasinksi, "The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage" The Tech (M.I.T.) 2/20/04 - "The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage. If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis cant it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction that love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos."
- Some evidence that polygamists, polyamorists, and others are looking to take advantage of the "slippery slope" argument: Stanly Kurtz, "Beyond Gay Marriage" The Weekly Standard 8/4/2003 - "If gays had a right to marry, why not polygamists?... Marriage will be transformed into a variety of relationship contracts, linking two, three, or more individuals (however weakly and temporarily) in every conceivable combination of male and female. A scare scenario? Hardly. The bottom of this slope is visible from where we stand. Advocacy of legalized polygamy is growing. A network of grass-roots organizations seeking legal recognition for group marriage already exists. The cause of legalized group marriage is championed by a powerful faction of family law specialists. Influential legal bodies in both the United States and Canada have presented radical programs of marital reform. Some of these quasi-governmental proposals go so far as to suggest the abolition of marriage. The ideas behind this movement have already achieved surprising influence with a prominent American politician...The [Tom] Green trial in 2001 was not just a cable spectacle. It brought out a surprising number of mainstream defenses of polygamy. And most of the defenders went to bat for polygamy by drawing direct comparisons to gay marriage...Writing in the Village Voice, gay leftist Richard Goldstein equated the drive for state-sanctioned polygamy with the movement for gay marriage. The political reluctance of gays to embrace polygamists was understandable, said Goldstein, but our fates are entwined in fundamental ways....Syndicated liberal columnist Ellen Goodman took up the cause of polygamy with a direct comparison to gay marriage...Stephen Clark, the legal director of the Utah ACLU, has said, 'Talking to Utah's polygamists is like talking to gays and lesbians who really want the right to live their lives.'"