The intersection of people I've met who actively fund and promote laws to deny gay people the right to marry and the people I've met who actively fund and promote laws to remove government from all marriage has been exactly zero people. I would love to be proven wrong about that, and I'm not saying your argument is incorrect, but I have personally only seen that argument used as an excuse to deny gay people the rights already given to heterosexual people.
You're most likely to find such people among principled libertarians. By their very nature they:
1) Don't care what consenting individuals do.
2) Want the power and influence of the State reduced.
Some of us are reasonably pragmatic and acknowledge that the State isn't going away any time soon. Therefore, we prefer that the State be as egalitarian as possible.
Others are less tolerable of pragmatism and do not support any expansion of State power. This has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation and is easily applied consistently.
Moreover, libertarians are very unlikely to even acknowledge marriage as a right. It's only meaningful in our society as a "right" precisely because governments grant special privileges to married couples. This discriminates against ALL unmarried people---not just gays.
If governments weren't involved in marriage, ALL of this would be a non-issue. People could choose to celebrate or signify their union in whichever manner they choose. To an anti-State ideologue, claiming that "well governments are involved so you might as just give them more power" is just a non-starter.
I get that participating in a lynch mob can be fun. But my only point here is that there are legitimate arguments for the other side that don't require bigotry. (Since other commenters were claiming this to be impossible.) This is an inconvenient fact for a lynch mob acting on limited information.
The important part of my comment was "actively fund[ing] and promot[ing] laws". I have no major problem with the argument that the state should be out of marriages entirely. That seems fully reasonable (at least to the extent I've thought about it).
My problem is that no one is actually trying to remove government from all marriages, as this argument would seem to imply. This argument is only used to defend removing gay rights, as with Prop 8.
Thanks for the link! I had not seen that before. I'd like to give the "get the government out of all marriage" position some more thought. As with any new position, I'm sure that will lead to quite a few questions and personal snags. Since you seem to believe in that, and I'm sure have thought about it more deeply than I have, I'd love to be able to field you some questions after a day or two if you wouldn't mind!
