The fundie in charge of this ballot initiative, Jerry Cox, admits that he was really after the gays but included the straight fornicators just in case someone would think that he's just singling us out:

Cox readily admitted that the impetus was to stop gays to "blunt the radical homosexual agenda," is what he said. He acknowledged that heterosexuals were thought about as afterthoughts mainly for the purpose of impressing a judge who might frown on the constitutional vulnerability of singling out gays. But he says it turns out that research has shown that heterosexual cohabitants provide bad environments for kids, too.

But he's still going after a very specific part of the straight population. While there are lots of arrangements under which straight couples could be having sex that would be nearly impossible for an adoption agency of a social worker to surveil, like two people living at separate addresses and having sex or married couples where one of partners is getting a little something on the side, the message that this sends is that any sex outside of marriage is going to be punished under the guise of the "best interests of the child" (citing, as always, that vague "research" that no one can pin down, because, of course, there is no such responsible research that says that sex occurring between people that a child knows hurts them).

In fact, Cox readily admits that he'd be against adoptive and foster parents having any sort of sexual relationships outside of marriage, but that the wording of the ballot initiative "was a matter of setting priorities and keeping proposals simple and understandable."

Marriage itself, with the social status and material benefits it gives to people who engage in the institution, added to the legal messiness and expense of leaving it, is about trying to regulate sexuality, punishing those who do not express their sexuality in a way deemed valuable by the government. This ballot initiative, by dividing cohabiting, conjugal, unmarried couples from all other straight people, puts the focus where it has been all along: on the sex.

And, of course, we queers get shafted the most out of deals like this one.