kbm, I have to ask if your post is opinion, are you just making things up, or do you think this is actually the law? Notwithstanding, you have several things completely wrong.
kbm8795 said:
The rights to marriage have long been recognized as HUMAN rights - not constitutional ones, meaning the choices of intimate relationships are supposed to rise above the interference of the state and the law.
Marriage, originally, was recognized as a religious union, not a human right. Regardless, I don't know what a HUMAN right is, unless you are referring to abstract concepts of 'natural rights' that aren't recognized in any legal sense. You might have a natural right, in some philosophers mind, to kill the person who rapes your wife, but that doesn't mean you won't be punished under the legal system.
Marriage, in the sense that it exists for purposes of US law, is a legal institution that is recognized and specifically defined. You might have some other form of religious 'marriage' that has nothing to do with filing papers or recieving rights from the state, but that is a seperate idea.
kbm8795 said:
When the state requires that individuals surrender their right to make that choice without proving any inherent harm, that is certainly a violation of their rights to equal protection.
Interesting wording here, though I don't know how you 'surrender' something that you never had.
Anyway, you do actually have a 'freedom of association,' which is a First Amendment right which precludes the government from telling you who you can and can't sleep with, spend time with...etc. That, however, does not mean you have a constitutional right to redefine any legal institution in anyway you see fit, as 'your choice,' and recieve the corresponding rights that go along with it.
kbm8795 said:
Moreover, the state has no constitutional foundation to declare that "marriage" between two members of the opposite sex is the only avenue in which to seek equal statutory protection for events which are individual experiences in life.
I don't know exactly what this is supposed to mean, or how it relates here. The government isn't precluding other means of achieving the same result, that I know of. For instance, in marriage the state recognizes community property. There are other means of achieving the same legal result, such as joint tenancies, or tenancies in common. I don't know where you would get the idea that the government is saying that marriage is the only avenue to get certain rights, such as property rights, which can be actually be had through other legal means.
kbm8795 said:
Health decisions, life arrangements, property dispersal, and funeral/burial arrangements are clearly defined as areas where the State has limited health risk interest in the private decisions of individuals - yet the attempt to pass constitutional amendments to "protect" marriage is actually an attempt to force those who cannot marry or choose not to marry to construct other means to only partially protect their legal rights to control events in their individual lives.
I read this several times, and I think it might form an actual thought, but I am not sure. What is a 'health risk interest in private decisions?' The government regulates certain things, like where you can bury a body, or how property is distributed in the event that someone dies without a will, but I don't know that those are 'health risk interests.' Anyway, those things can be decided and contractually agreed on between people outside of marriage. For instance, someone can set up a trust of $1,000 and specify that this money is to be used to bury John next to Jim with a joint headstone reading 'forever in love.' Also, anyone can write a holographic will relatively no trouble whatsoever. I don't know that there is a constitutional right to have the state recognize a scheme of property distribution for you in case you die without a will, in any event, isn't it easier just to write a will? As far as health decisions go, people can draft legal instruments specifying how it is to be handled if they end up like Terry Schiavo, or presumably who is to make the decision.
kbm8795 said:
And let me make something else clear here - the State does not afford the "right" to marry - Supreme Court decisions for decades have made it rather clear that the State is only allowed to interfere in personal choices when it can PROVE that there is an inherent harm to society. Conservatives have been unable to prove any inherent harm with same-sex marriages, though they desperately attempt to create research (which is usually quickly debunked) in order to support their contention and provide the State with some legitimate reason to deny those statutory protections. The State can only define marriage along certain guidelines in which it can prove harm - not simply because the neighbors don't "like" it or their corner church thinks it is sinful.
This is completely backwards. The Supreme Court has recognized a 'right of privacy' in personal choices having to do with one's own body. Thus, the government cannot tell you that you can't sleep with a someone of the same sex.
I don't know that any court has ever construed a right of privacy to mandate State's rewriting the definitions of legal institutions to correspond to anyone's whim.
I think you can make the argument that marriage should be extended to same-sex couples, but I don't think you can make the argument that existing law prohibits government and society from defining legal ideas such as marriage (or employment rights). Things have to have definitions, that is the nature of the world. Marriage, conventionally, has been defined as being between two consenting adults of opposite genders.