why is this important?

I'm not sure what your point is Glenn

I guess it's clear that we're not talking about "traditional marriage", except that "traditional marriage" is hardly what most people are advocating having when they discuss getting married in the modern world anyway. Most (heterosexual) couples are entering into more equal partnerships than ever before, with greater liberties for women but less for children than ever before, with an expectation of more romantic attachment than was true before, and with more state recognition than was the case before. And they're also exiting those contracts at reasonably high clips as well (less high than during the 70s or as in England). I suppose the difficulty is that I long ago decided the phrase "traditional marriage" was a misnomer or otherwise meaningless phrase and to ignore people spewing it as a cover for their bias or shield against homosexuals having equal contractual rights that would be respected by the state (as they often aren't).

What also amuses me is that I have a pretty low expectation for relationships anyway. I think many of us do with a cultural flow that includes parents or parents of friends who may have separated or divorced. Al and Tipper lasted for 40 years. I figure that collectively raising their kids was good enough on that front. 40 years is a pretty damned long time to be with one person (longer than I've been alive of course). I see marriages as a contractual arrangement and divorce as an unsuccessful attempt to arbitrate over a contractual dispute (arising from a need to renegotiate some of the terms). In general, it would not surprise me that such a need and unsuccessful attempt might arise sometime over a 40 year period. It does surprise me that so many people enter into such contracts only to leave them after very brief periods, under the logic that apparently they either didn't take their contract very seriously or they didn't think hard enough about the fact that there were (at least) two parties to it.

And it also surprises me that people then don't look at such actions and decide that the point of these contracts is to experiment and try to find someone you can tolerate to be in a long-term continuous bargaining position with (presumably someone who you require only minimal adjustments, ie some you "love" by choice). If that's the decision logic involved, then I don't understand the objection to homosexuals mutually choosing each other. If there's some other decision logic involved, then it's not very applicable to the modern environment of partnerships founded on a consumption pattern rather than for the purposes of producing and raising loads of offspring for production purposes (agriculture, or war).

But I still don't see how people who have had multiple marriages serially are in any way invalidated in their opinion, even though I think their opinion is equally silly as their choices in marrying serially.