What do you want, a medal? Let me offer Banuchi a more apt analogy than his gold and sandstone, so it will make more sense to be concerned with how government labels something: marriage is like a medal. If the government had a medal that had previously been given only to soldiers who had been wounded in battle while saving the life of another, and it then starts giving the medal to all soldiers wounded in battle, the soldiers who met the higher standard would suffer a devaluation of their medal.

But why should government be involved in giving out medals for the quality of our personal relationships? But let's say we think that government should be giving out medals to honor people's relationships and that marriage is the highest honor to be paid. Shouldn't government have to apply a more substantive standard for handing out honors than just the sex of the proposed recipients? Government does not and cannot examine what is really deeply valuable about a relationship. That would be an outrageous intrusion. All that is left then is to honor people because of their genitalia.

So the new analogy--which I think is better than any other analogy I've seen--is also defective. The devalued medal had once designated a particularly worthy performance in battle, and now no longer communicates that the person who received the medal had that additional distinction. The label marriage, when restricted to different sex couples, isn't needed to communicate that a couple in fact has the distinction of having two kinds of genitalia. If people could marry without the two sex requirement, we'd still be able to detect which couples met the man + woman standard. What we would lose is the government's expression of the belief that higher honor is due. People need to think clearly about not just whether that belief is correct but about whether government ought to be expressing it.