I recently got into a brief exchange with someone I believe to be another conservative over in the comment section of one of the blogs I follow.  The subject came up on gay marriage and one of the things the comment author posted struck me as being very wrong, but likely representative of a very common belief.  I rather liked the exchange, and I’ve reproduced the interesting bit below.

to deny a group of people the right to love one another

You know, this is a rather stunning non sequitur, if you really stop and think about it.

While love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage, nobody in their right mind would say that a horse is a carriage or that a carriage is a horse. So too with marriage and love.

How many married couples can you think of who stayed together after the flame had worn out, either because divorce wasn’t worth the trouble, or because they had kids, or for any of a number of other reasons? How many people have you loved but not married? How many people do you love but have not married? And does the lack of a marriage somehow make that love less sincere?

I haven’t seen anyone — anyone — say that gays can’t love each other, or that it should be illegal for them to do so. Marriage is but a single facet of the overall picture. To be sure, it carries certain symbolic and legal implications which may or may not be borne out by domestic partnership.

There are many good arguments to be made in favor of gay marriage. There are even good conservative arguments for it. However, fallaciously equating love to marriage is not among them, and you could probably do better by finding an argument with a bit more logical consistency behind it.

Now, it occurred to me sometime after posting this that I was actually wrong to say that I haven’t seen anyone say that gays can’t love each other.  In fact, I have.  Once.  The result of which has done more emotional violence to the family than any harm I could imaginine arising from homosexual relationships as such.

To be sure, the destruction of families runs directly contrary to any conservative value I recognize.  That someone would allow a matter of homosexuality to destroy a family strikes me as being entirely incompatible with conservatism as a whole.  That, I think most would agree, is a travesty regardless of one’s political persuasions.