Historically, marriage is an interpersonal relationship with society or obtains legal constraints. Individuals may have many specific reasons to marry, such as legal, social, emotional, economic, spirit and faith. Usually, when people talk about marriage, they generally accept the form of it is one male and one female. However, as time passes by, the conceptual meaning of marriage is changing. Gay marriage, same-sex marriage, has become a common debate, and there are lots of issues about permitting gay marriage; legalizing homosexual marriage is the most popular debate that gets the attention from the whole society. In the article “Gay Marriage -- and Marriage,” Sam Schulman argues against the legalization of gay marriage, claiming if allowing homosexual couples to be legal spouses, it will create a detriment to community and children’s welfare. On the contrary, in the article “Here Comes the Groom: A Conservative Case for Gay Marriage,” Andrew Sullivan claims that promoting the legalization of gay marriages is reasonable to do so, and his arguments are directed to conservative, heterosexual individuals who extremely oppose the proposal of legalizing gay marriage. After exploring both of articles, Schulman and Sullivan respectively propose their own argument on gay marriage, but Schulman's is the opposite of Sullivan's.
Opponents of gay marriage point out that millions of people object to the idea of legalizing gay marriage. As one such opponent, Schulman disagrees on gay marriage, because it is neither good for human being nor the society. In his view, the consequence of legalizing gay marriage is at risk of not only making children feel depressed, but gravely changing our awareness of sustaining the most basic concept of our humanity. He then finds that some people seemingly attempt to impose a completely different new meaning of same-sex marriages to each one in the society (129). Basically, Schulman is saying that gay mar...