SSM is not marriage. Two persons of the same sex are incapable of forming a conjugal relationship. Mislabelling the one-sex relationship as “marriage” does not magically make them capable.

Marriage is the combination of A) integration of the sexes (i.e. man and woman) with B) responsible procreation. This is extrinsic to all one-sex arrangements — of which the homosexual relationship types are subsets.

Your remark about infertility is way off-base if you meant to suggest that two persons of the same sex form an infertile couple. Or a combination analogous with an infertile couple.

Two persons of the same sex form a combination that is not infertile for together their combination was never fertile.

The same-sex pair, like a lone individual, might be fertile with the other sex. But such a pair is not disabled, like a man-woman pair who might experience subfertility or infertility due to misfortune or old age.

Afterall, who among SSM advocates would claim that homosexuality is a disability? Or that the choice to form a one-sex relationship is the equivalent of, for example, the choice to treat cancer through surgery or radiation therapy?

The marriage idea of “in sickness and in health” is directly connected to the combination of A and B above. It is the nature of the human being to enter this life non-fertile, to become fertile, to mature and eventually experience diminished fertility until it is gone altogether. Of course fertility is variable. It is variable for each and every healthy man-woman couple who will be fertile for only short periods of each month of their childbearing years. Couples who seek medical help for fertility problems generally resolve their troubles through behavior (such as a change in diet and such). More than half of couples who seek further medical help already have had at least one child.

So your pointing to infertility as some major weakness in the man-woman criteria is really missing the forest for the trees. Fertility is variable for the man-woman combination. However, the sterility of all one-sex combinations is constant both in kind and in degree for it varies neither by happenstance nor by the day of the month nor by the normal maturation of the two persons. Rather, sterility is the nature of an arrangement which lacks the other sex.

One should recognize fertilty for what it is. And infertility for what it is.

This will aide in recognition of marriage for what it is.

Both fertilty and marriage arise from the two-sexed nature of humankind. Integration of the sexes is essential to both; responsible procreation flows from this indispensable human community of husband and wife.

Barring tragic circumstances, each of us is directly responsible for the children we create within such a complementary combination. That is the first principle of responsible procreation and, rather blatantly, the advocates of SSM contradict, disparage, and trivialize it.

No two-mom or two-dad couple can attain children without parental relinquishment or loss. No such couple can align with the core of marriage for the one-sex pair is sex-segregative and in form is entirely sterile.

Your pointing to infertility looks a good deal like trying to claim for homosexuals the status of disability. It amounts to asserting the false equivalency.

Trying move marriage recognition away from the core of marriage is like trying to move a football game to the sidelines. Essentially, SSM advocates argue for the replacement of marriage recognition with something that is not even within the ballpark.

Instead of seeking such a replacement via a merger of the conjugal relationship and the newly idealized homosexual relationship, put SSM on its own two feet. Make it stand on its own merits and demerits. Don’t demand that society treat the conjugal relationship as if it was the homosexual relationship. Focus on the nature of the new relationship form you wish to elevate via the authority of the state and, thus, with societal approval.