A vital difference between gay men and straight women

I was reading an interesting article by Michael Kirby, former supreme court judge and gay marriage advocate, and I came across an anecdote that actually, if unintentionally, supports my anti gay marriage stance.

The meat of the anecdote was that in the late 1960s Kirby was dating Johan van Vloten, the man who would become his life partner. A few weeks into the relationship, Kirby's first love, a gorgeous European boy named Demo, phoned him in Sydney to say that he was going to be back in Australia and in Melbourne for the weekend, and would Kirby like to come down and hook up? Kirby said yes, and duly went down to Melbourne for his dirty weekend, although he mentioned that Johan van Vloten was hurt by the abandonment.

Here's the thing: one of the pro gay marriage arguments is that there's no real difference between a love between a man and a woman and a love between a man and a man. It's all just love, right? Well, no. Change the genders and this whole scenario changes. If Kirby was straight, and he told a woman he'd been dating for some weeks that he was popping down to Melbourne for the weekend to bang his ex... well, it's pretty certain she wouldn't be waiting for him when he got back. As a general rule, women need to know that they are at the top of any potential mate's priority list. With gay men, the expections of fidelity, and the line between partner and buddy, are blurred.

This is just one example of how the core criteria by which a relationship is judged to be a success or a failure are different between straights and gays. So how then can the formal expression of both those relationships be defined as "marriage" without stripping marriage down to its crudest base?

When men and women partner up, it's more than just their genitals that fit together like a plug and socket. It's also their psyches, their psychologies. They are different but complementary, and it's those complementary differences that lock them together.

Marriage is a thing that a man and a woman do to create a dual entity as ancient as human civilisation. Gay marriage, on the other hand, is just a hissy fit by power-crazed gay ideologues.