Is this the Institution of Marriage We're Supposed to be Protecting?

Marriage equality seems to most often be a fight happening in the courtrooms and at the ballot boxes in America. And we've had seen celebrities like Sarah Silverman say that she will not get married until all people are allowed to get married. And on one hand, it's a very noble stand to take. However, I have to take my hat off to an Orlando artist, Brian Feldman, who simply said he was willing to marry any woman who showed up at the courthouse to shed light on the idiocy of excluding gay men and lesbians from the institution.

There is no way that he can legally be stopped from marrying a total stranger who is also a woman. There (presumably) is no mention of love or no mention of him being selective in any way. He didn't say the woman needed to be attractive, needed to want to start a family or anything -- just be willing to get married to him. Is it a publicity stunt, sure. But the best publicity stunts are the ones that make us laugh and then make us think. If two complete strangers can go get a marriage license and then get married, what is really the harm in allowing to adults of the same sex to do so as well?

Many will argue that marriage is the building block of the family structure to which I have two counterpoints: 1) there are children born every day to single women and are often raised without contact from their biological father; and 2) there are couples who simply choose not to have children even when they are married. In fact, according to a 2007 Pew Research Center survey, Forty-one percent of Americans said children are "very important" to a successful marriage -- down from from 65 percent in 1990.

Lastly, and I think this is the most important point of all, who does it really bother and how are individuals affected? If there are hundreds of thousands of gay and lesbian married couples in the world, how does that affect any of us? If we are heterosexual, does allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry destabilize our relationships? I don't think it logically can (unless you were married to a person who had same sex attraction to begin with).