One of the old anti-same-sex marriage canards was that a same sex couple couldn’t reproduce. I twas run through the gut pretty quickly because, well, it’s a stupid argument and because it was pointed out that women who have gone through menopause were legally allowed to get married.
Never let it be said that the progressives don’t want the impossible.
Leave it to my state of California to head off in radical and expensive directions. Legislation has been filed that would require group insurance to cover gay and lesbian infertility treatments just as they do heterosexual. But, as I note elsewhere, AB 460 isn’t limited to a finding of actual infertility. Nor does it require that gays and lesbians have tried to conceive or sire a child using heterosexual means, natural or artificial. Rather–as with heterosexual couples–merely the inability to get pregnant for a year while having active sexual relations is sufficient to demonstrate need for treatment, meaning if the bill becomes law, it would require insurance companies to pay for services such as artificial insemination, surrogacy, etc. for people who are actually fecund.
And as Wesley J. Smith points out in the linked article, don’t expect this to stay in California.
On a different note, I’m gaming the SCOTUS same-sex marriage decisions and am looking at a 10-12% chance of coming very close to getting what I have been advocating for for years: No government regulation of marriage.
If they decide that DOMA is dumb and the federal government cannot regulate marriage AND that Prop 8 is dumb and the state governments cannot regulate marriage. What will it be then? Individual counties? Cities and burgs? My goodness, what mess that’ll be!
Perhaps they will rule that “marriage” is a religious concept, and it was wrong for the Government to make a religious concept into Civil Law in the first place. They could just find that all State-sanctioned “marriages” are Civil Unions, nothing more, and get the Government out of the religion business entirely.
So, you would be “United” with your spouse by the State, and if you wanted to be “married in the eyes of God”, you would find a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc to do that for you, if the religious place chose to do that. Pastors/rabbis/imams/shamans and maybe Sea Captains would lose their current automatic ability to conduct Civil Unions.
This is NOT high Science, but it DOES involve correcting a mistake the Founders made, so it will be plenty controversial.
IMO marriage is a Civil Law concept mainly so it can be taxed and so the resultant arguments between spouses can be regulated via Family Court, thus employing more lawyers and Civil Law staffers and bureaucrats…