Opinion:   “The Amendment is not about discriminating against anyone. It is about preventing radical redefinition of marriage, families, and the natural process of producing and raising children within the safe, nurturing, and successful incubator of marriage.

Fact:  If you deny an existing civil right, a right not already denied by the Constitution, you are discriminating. Prior to the 19th amendment, in 1920, those denying women the vote were discriminating. That's how a civil right becomes codified: human beings are born with the right, and eventually the citizenry, after some unpleasantness, writes it down on a piece of paper. These rights do not arise, nor are they invented. They were always there. The only way to show that this current amendment won’t discriminate is to prove that the right to same-sex unions never existed in the first place, or that it has been denied already in the Constitution. There is no document listing all of our rights. There is no right to same-sex unions exactly as there's no right to put cheese on bread and make a grilled-cheese sandwich. The Constitution is, so far, silent on both subjects.

An analysis of some of the terms used here:

"...radical redefinition of marriage": The suggestion is that a single, unwavering 'definition' of marriage exists. Actually, it doesn’t. And there was no redefinition of the term "free man" inherent in the 13th amendment. There was a removal of artificial barriers, and a redefinition of "courage".

"...redefinition of families": Just as there is no single, universal definition of "marriage", there is an even less singular definition of 'family' - and even if there were, no person or group holds trademark on it. A family exists when a group of people identify themselves as such. But if the accusation of "a redefinition of family" is actually meant as a declaration that gay people can't possibly form legitimate families, then this statement is presents problems. The implication is that, even if they're legally recognized, same-sex unions and gay adoptions don't constitute 'real' families. The only way to rally one's faculties around the idea that two individuals aren't capable of forming a family is to argue that those two people aren't fully, really, human, and that would come across as stinging and painful to many. Our country has felt these stings in earlier periods - a grappling with the definitions of "human being" and "civil rights". Gay people all belong to 'traditional' families, and some belong to untraditional families, whether they’re married or not. A willful, or uninformed, denial of history and current world culture are necessary in order to entertain the idea that same-sex relationships are somehow different than family.

To the extent that it was ever true, marriage has had very little to do with our notions of ‘family’ for a long time, and the numbers of those who choose not to marry are steadily increasing. Are these unmarried heterosexual couples and their children not families?

At times we, the voting public, have chosen to define 'family' for legal purposes. This messy endeavor has always resulted in a funhouse fragmented nation of myriad official definitions of 'family'. Polygamy and polygyny have been allowed and disallowed. The original Utah Territory was largely Mormon, with polygamy promoted by its government and people. Marriages between Chinese people and Caucasians were illegal for much of our history. Among the rights that the children of slaves did not have was the right to consider themselves legally a part of a 'family'. So, the definition of 'legal family' changes according to the actions of our democratically elected representatives.

"...redefinition of natural process of producing and raising children...": Unless there have been developments in the last few minutes, it's not necessary to redefine the human reproductive process beyond the redefinitions already created largely for opposite-sex couples over the last few decades: in-vitro, intracytoplasmic sperm injection, surrogacy, embryo bank cryopreservation, artificial insemination. Just ask Louise Brown about the natural process of producing children. The world's first test-tube baby is now 33 years old.

There's similarly no goal of redefining the 'natural process' of raising children, because that process has never been universally defined in the first place. At various times in human history, and even today, children have been legally abandoned, adopted, borrowed, bought, sold, exchanged, institutionalized, and shared. That last one involves millions of children today, whose parents, though death do them not part, raise them according to court-ordered calendars. Is that natural? Perhaps not, but it is extraordinarily common, as is parenting by grandparents and other family members, single-parenting as a result of death or absence, single-parent adoptions of children, and fostering. None of these parenting situations seems to be called 'unnatural', none is necessarily detrimental, and each developed as an answer to the question: what's best for the child?

"...safe, nurturing incubator of marriage": These are feel-good, probably meaningless words: a single kind of "traditional marriage", as has been shown, does not exist. But even if we were to ascribe some sort of universal 'tradition' to opposite-sex, monogamous marriages, nothing unique to that tradition produces a safe, nurturing incubator disproportionately to less traditional unions. How do we know this? Anecdotal evidence we all see every day, backed up by the best scientific evaluations we can get our hands on. Child welfare, medical and psychological associations tend to rely on science. That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics and all leading child welfare agencies recommend full legal adoption rights for gay people and couples.

The late State Senator James Forrester (R-Gaston), during floor debate on this proposed amendment, said, “Two dads don't make a mom. Two moms don’t make a dad. Children need both a father and a mother." Of the many possible invalidations of Forrester's concerns, it's most efficient to just point out that an official concern for potential children would require government to also criminalize single-parenting. Government must also then make exceptions for two women, for instance, who desire a civil union, and who are both raising children through shared custody with their former husbands. Government would also, by these criteria, need to make divorce illegal for couples who already have children, or have conceived children.
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http://www.adoptioninstitute.org/policy/2006_Expanding_Resources_for_Children.php