I, as a strong supporter of gay rights, have decided to respond to the arguments I most commonly hear about the subject.

Argument number 1:
Homosexuality is a sin.
Since sin is a relative moral concept determined by religion, it has no bearing on U.S. law because of seperation of church and state.

Argument number 2:
You never see animals engaging in homosexual acts.
First of all, that is in no way relevant. We don't see animals do a lot of things. Should it be illegal to wear clothes? Animals don't. For that matter, should it be legal to kill people so we can take their women? Because animals do that. If we base our society on what we observe in nature, there's no point to society at all. Secondly, you do see animals engaging in homosexual acts. There are well documented cases of more than 500 species of animals engaging in homosexual acts. And those are just the documented ones. It's been observed in nearly 1500.

Argument number 3:
What next; are you going to let people marry animals?
If animals were intelligent enough to give consent, why not let people marry them? I see no reason to prohibit it other than the matter of consent.

Argument number 4:
Allowing same sex couples to marry devalues the concept of marriage.
Well that entirely depends on what you believe the concept of marriage is. If you believe that the concept of marriage is two people making a commitment to love each other, or even just be together, then I don't see how gay marriage falls outside that. In fact, it would actually devalue the concept of marriage to not let two such people get married. Since the only technical difference between genders is genitalia, the only definition of marriage that supports the argument is this: A penis and a vagina making a commitment to be together. And, granted, some people do get married just to have sex, but those are the least stable kind of relationships.

Argument number 4.5:
The point of marriage is procreation and same sex couples can't do that.
This is similar to, but more extreme than, the last one. If the legality of marriage was based solely upon reproduction, this is what the world would have to be like: It would be illegal for infertile men and women to get married. It would be illegal for any married person to buy birth control. All married women would have a legal obligation to become impregnated again as soon as they recovered from their last pregnancy. As soon as a woman hit menopause, her marriage would no longer be recognized. You might think that's ridiculous and that's because it is. It's one thing to say that the point of sex is to reproduce, but to say that the point of marriage is to reproduce completely defeats the whole point of even having marriage. At that point, it just becomes something you do for a few months every now and then so you can have kids without angering god. That hardly sounds like a sacred union that needs to be protected.