You're right. Money is the real issue.

Marriage has always been a financial arrangement. It's not about the survival of the our species. It's not about love. It's about controlling property across generations, by declaring families for purposes of inheritance. Our species survives just fine with or without marriage. Marriage for love is a recent development, as a feature of modern individualistic societies. But property ownership and social status remains central, regardless of who arranged the marriage or whether love was involved.

You say marriage evolved over thousands of years and in multiple forms. That sounds like constant change to me. It's not true that all historical versions of marriage were restricted to the union of male and female until recently. It's true that the most familiar forms of marriage involve one man and at least one woman. But it's a big world out there with a long history. Many family configurations have existed.

Since the main purpose for marriage is to assign property and privilege to newborn babies, it's not surprising that most historical forms of marriage are organized around childbirth. How sad it is, indeed.

Marriage can continue to evolve. I, for one, support the advancement of society to a better place, whether in its understanding of family, or any other movement toward a better place.

To be fair, it's not proponents of gay marriage who are passing new laws to allow it. It's the opponents who are passing new laws in order to stop it.

Who's redefining marriage here?

No, I say marriage as a conspiratorial construct by "us" in order to make familial affiliation publicly explicit. And I say family affiliation is important when one lives in a society that accumulates wealth and/or nobility over multiple generations. Marriage is created and refined by the culture, not by DNA.

Biological evolution doesn't give a flying turd about our society. All it cares about is which alleles happen to proliferate more than others at any given time. If culture emerges as a result, so be it. Evolution doesn't care if leaving dozens of fatherless children is good for our society. It cares whether some of those children manage to survive to make children of their own. If having fewer children, and investing in their upbringing causes more fertile grandchildren among humans than does the fuck-and-run strategy, all the traits that tend toward causing people to want to implement the more reproductively successful strategy are selected for. But what about a strategy of monogamy plus infidelity plus jealousy? The point is, that there are many competing reproductive strategies, and a complex, ever-refining blend of strategies and counterstrategies is what we see in the natural world.

Cue this up to 26:00

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/91731/detail/

You say marriage customs are a direct manifestation of innate pair-bonding urges between male and female humans. Well, that doesn't match what we see. There are vast differences in marriage customs throughout the world, though there are only tiny genetic variations among humans. There are biological urges that compete with pair-bonding urges, yet those other urges are not given a central role in organizing society. If human pair-bonding were truly such a dominant instinct, divorce would be physiologically impossible except in cases of medical pathology. And then there's the rather obvious observation that most marriage customs are largely about injunctions against infidelity, and not merely affirming a pair-bond. No, marriage is not a codification of biological urges. It is a codification of cultural norms for purposes of publicly identifying family lineages, and is strongest in cultures that care the most about unambiguous family definition.

But really, if homosexuals claim to share this pair-bonding marriage urge you describe, who are we to say they don't. You can't have it both ways.

Firstly, there is no such thing as "cultural evolution." Cultural tastes change. They don't "evolve." Is 50 Cent more evolved than Mozart? Is Britney Spears more evolved than Ella Fitgerald? Is Emo an "advancement" over Gregorian chanting? Hardly. It's just further proof you don't understand the concept of evolution.

You appear to be confusing cultural diversity with evolution. Reggae vs. heavy metal is an example of cultural diversity. But why does music in any form exist in the first place? It's because we have evolved to recognize sound patterns, and to communicate using symbols. In that sense, all music is the same.

Communism vs. democracy is cultural diversity. But why does government in any form exist? Because we evolved with a need and an ability to create social order. For that reason, all government is the same.

And the concept of marriage is brimming with cultural diversity. But, and this is the question you consistently refuse to address, why does marriage of any form exist in the first place? It's the evolution of the male/female bond. In that way, all marriage is the same.

Consider this. If humans had evolved to reproduce asexually - no need to pair up and swap genes - then there would be no such thing as marriage, would there? There would be no need for it. Ergo, WE DIDN'T INVENT IT. Evolution did. And to think words are going to magically re-invent it is pure folly. If we evolved to produce homosexually, then THAT would be the foundation of marriage, and heterosexuals would be the pretenders. It's not our choice. It's evolution. Please look up the definition of the word.