Brendan O'Neill's always-provocative take on what is really driving the war on marriage:

"If you stop to think about it, you will notice that nothing in the gay-marriage debate makes sense. The struggle for ‘marriage equality’ is presented to us as a good, natural, straightforward civil-rights thing, which only cranky men of the cloth could feel riled by. But just a couple of minutes’ thoughtful consideration should reveal that it is in fact the most surreal campaign of our age, whose ascendancy to the top of the political agenda in Australia, Britain and the US defies both logic and reason."

... In a nutshell, then, the ‘gay marriage rights’ juggernaut is a campaign for something that gays traditionally haven’t been interested in, backed by people who don’t care very much for either marriage or rights. What’s really going on here? I propose that the only way we can properly understand the speedy rise of this bizarre issue, and its embrace by everyone from a cross-parliamentary inquiry in Australia to Barack Obama to Goldman Sachs (seriously), is as an act of high and unprecedented political opportunism. The real value of the gay-marriage issue is not in the improvements it will allegedly make to homosexual people’s lives, but rather in the opportunity for moral posturing and right-on preening it affords to its backers. Gay marriage isn’t a real issue; it’s a cultural signifier, where you support it in order to show that you are decent, enlightened and, most importantly, not like Them, the rabble.

In an era when old-style morality is on the wane, if not dead, the elites are forever feeling around for new issues through which they can communicate their moral superiority. And right now, banging on about gay marriage is the main way they do this. -- The Australian Spectator