It's amusing, if a little depressing, to watch the opponents of gay marriage scrambling to come up with a rational argument. They know they're against it, they know it will "undermine the institution of marriage" (and therefore undermine society itself), they know it will "weaken" the age-old procreative imperatives between men and women (and therefore send families, churches, barbecues and Home Depot tumbling into a depraved, swirling, orgiastic downtown kind of anarchy, like a nightmarish Bosch painting), but they can't really explain how. In all the published arguments against legally recognized homosexual unions, the paragraphs that one expects to follow "it will weaken the institution of marriage" are missing. It's as if the religious right just goes comatose at the keyboard at this critical juncture. Their brains go blank. Watching them trying to extract a rational argument from their intuitions and emotions is like watching a group of stoned teenagers trying to open a locked safe with sledgehammers.

Their emotional agitation grows as they begin to realize, too, that they are losing: that it is inevitable, given the freedoms of contemporary democracy, that gay unions become recognized in this country and then gradually in every other democracy, just as homosexuality itself gradually became legal over the course of the last century. And so, in their frenzy, they start to lose it and make emotional outbursts like that of poor, frightened Tory MP Elsie Wayne, who sputtered last week that she just didn't want to see gays prancing about "on floats." The emotional outbursts are far more interesting than the waffling, pseudo-rational articles, because they reflect the true source of the unease. This is not a fear of an actual societal change. Of course there will be no profound change to social structures: Gay couples are already provided with most of the benefits that common-law couples are entitled to.

The legal change is mostly symbolic; it reflects a reality that is already widespread and accepted, and the numbers of people it affects are minuscule. This is a fear of homosexuals themselves, of having them unashamedly and openly in our midst and having to tolerate them. Elsie Wayne is afraid not of gay marriage but of gay "parades." How exactly will gay marriages "undermine" heterosexual marriage? Will seeing smiling gay people on the steps of town halls infect us somehow, like a virus, and turn us all gay? Will it prevent us from having children?

The most interesting opposition to gay marriage, to my mind, was a furious burst of legalese from a "professor of Christian thought" in the National Post. Douglas Farrow of McGill University doesn't claim that new marriage legislation will weaken the institution: He says it will abolish it. If we tamper with the religious model of marriage between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation, he points out, then various questions arise as to the point of having a state-defined union of any kind. "Is not the very idea of an exclusionary institution dubious?" Farrow asks, ". . . it is not clear why this institution should be sexual in nature, or at least why the state should take any interest in whether it is sexual. The same argument used to exclude procreation as a defining feature can be used to exclude sexual activity altogether. Why should two, or more, spinsters, mutually reliant in every other way, be excluded because they don't venture into each other's erogenous zones? It is doubtful whether this institution should concern the state in the first place. Are people living in pairs better citizens than people living in other forms of community? Take reproduction and cross-gender bonding out of the picture, and what picture is left? What is there of vital interest to the state? In other words, why set up this alternative to marriage at all? Enlightened by our Charter we will rid ourselves of marriage, as (enlightened by The Bible) we did of slavery. Why not leave it at that?"

Now, if you can read this and somehow not hear the dripping sarcasm, you might think this guy was a postmodern leftist. Because he's onto something. His sarcastic alternative is, I think, a serious one. To Farrow, these are all arguments for leaving state-defined marriage exactly as it was: i.e., an echo of a Christian concept. But to me, these arguments are all support for an entirely new proposal, one that we haven't heard seriously yet: Why not eliminate marriage as a legal category altogether, and leave it as a religious one? Farrow notes that "the state did not invent marriage." I say this often myself: Marriage is, as the homophobes consistently and vociferously point out, fundamentally a religious tradition. That's exactly why I personally don't want to have much to do with it. And we have, at least nominally, a separation of church and state here. We don't issue legal certificates for confirmations, circumcisions or bar mitzvahs. Why not leave marriage to the churches and temples and covens? They can exclude anyone they want, for whatever sacred reason, from their magic rituals. And people can choose, for their part, whether they want to belong to the religion. Why does the government have to be involved at all? I don't see why people living together in whatever union they choose should get tax breaks or administrative categories because of it.

Sure, the state should not discourage procreation, as it is a natural human impulse, and children need to be protected. But the state already does this, in the form of child-support benefits and tax breaks for parents. Again, this has nothing to do with marriage.

Maybe it's time for the state to get entirely out of the business of sanctioning or defining religious rituals. Maybe marriage is a legal category we no longer need.