I'm so sick of people like Brian Brown lecturing on this as if men and women won't be able to go on with their lives and whatever children they do or don't plan.
Marriage is open to all manner of people that the likes of BB couldn't know at face value what their qualities are or will be for successful marriage and parenting.

It IS marriage itself that has no requirements except that those adults who engage in it, do what they can.
The states interests are essentially simplicity, no redundancy as far as kinship and marriage status is concerned, consent and primacy.
The basics of this are as required for gay people as het people.

The loaded words like 'best', 'special' and 'children' gives assumption that ONLY hets are parents or will be, that hets are the only people capable of success at commitment and parenting and ONLY het's children matter.

BB's own words give weight to the values of supremacists, segregationists and other people who fostered and demanded to maintain a SYSTEM of bigotry and discrimination.
It's the bigoted policies that disenfranchise otherwise productive and contributing members of society that claim such a system as the invention of God (or God's more special people), so therefore no challenges should be to it by those they consider can take no credit for it's creation or sustainability.

One can easily see the simplistic patterns of language, but no context or references to the different historical abuses of 'their' God driven system on other vulnerable people, ESPECIALLY in our own nation.

We have recent history to inform us as recently as 30 years ago.
People like BB keep referring to marriage as if it's never changed, only recently been a matter of romantic choice or has become more egalitarian along gender lines in the last 20 years.

There are even older women opposed to marriage equality who forgot when 'obey' was part of their vows to their husbands AND when obtaining independent means of income and credit was impossible.

BB and his ilk speak as if to children, to simple minds and people who lack a serious conscious about recent history.

They want to keep referring to Biblical history as if it hasn't been tampered with, reinterpreted and most of all, created and enforced by MEN throughout the centuries.
Women and homosexuals in particular are repressed, endangered and devalued globally, and blamed for all manner of mankind's problems.

But recent history, the kind most of us have lived through, were eyewitnesses to and were affected directly, well...somehow what WE have to say in that context is meaningless to the likes of Maggie G and BB.
Meaningless in ways they are not willing to understand especially that they and others coexist with what their religious belief abhors, everyday.
Someone does, all day, any day of life in secular and poly religious America.

Without the important historical context of institutionalized bigotry, calling them bigots is far more accurate than calling gay men and women in this country incapable of making supportive and desirable contributions to this society.

BB insults those adults who have no children or can't as worthless to the health and welfare of society, and does so also to the gay men and women who have adopted, fostered and given birth to children and support them ably and with considerable commitment without legal obligation to do so.

Maggie G and BB haven't themselves adopted children out of the foster system, nor are they all that concerned about how gay parents are to maintain legal authority and security with their children WITHOUT marriage or dependence on the hostile whims of strangers.
Hostility and fear that BB himself fosters.

Of course HE wouldn't think he was a bigot.
But then, HE hasn't had nearly the experience WITH bigotry that most of us have known all our lives.
And by that same reasoning, HE won't recognize the horrible damage that bigotry does to real lives and most of all...doesn't have to care as much as we do.
And knows he doesn't. Otherwise, he wouldn't appeal to the basest of prejudice to achieve his ends.
And in that end, even marriage won't win.