What are the sociological impacts of legalizing same-sex marriages?

I was talking with a friend after church about the issue of homosexuality. One point of our discussion was whether the state decriminalizing homosexuality and sanctioning same-sex marriages result in any negative impact.

My friend was talking about how he had read from certain sociological research papers showing an increase in divorce rates in countries that have legalized same-sex marriages. Of course, proponents of same-sex marriage would dispute that the correlation would imply causality.

Perhaps it might be useful to examine how civilizations and cultures in history that have permitted homosexuality turned out. After all, homosexuality being accepted in cultures is not unprecedented. There were practices of homosexuality in ancient cultures, such as ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

I heard from Professor Thio Li-Ann in one of her Christian-theme talks about how the ancient Greeks idealized the sexual relationship between a male tutor and his male student who is an adolescent youth, and that women were seen as chattels, and the form of sexual unions with them were seen in a rather functional way as being for reproductive purpose rather than for love. Did the veneration of homosexual relationship actually cause degradation in the status of women in ancient Greece?

But what about legalizing homosexual marriages in today’s world? What repercussions can actually result from it? If we were to talk about incestuous relationships, we might agree that such relationships ultimately cause harm to the genetic pool because inbreeding results in the expression of defective genes. And I have heard quite a novel argument that the sanctioning of polyamourous marriages where there are more than one man and one women considered married is detrimental as it can result in a large group of people joining themselves up to obtain this married status that would in a way threaten the power of the state. A point raised by my friend was that the normalization of arrangements outside the traditional concept of one man-one woman in marriage is that it results in the weakening of the family structure, which ultimately increases the dependence for the state for the upbringing of children, a counter to the initial objectives for the state to be minimal in the lives of individuals.

Truth be told, I am a little hard of imagination for how legalization of same-sex marriages will negatively affect society. I don’t think that there is anything in the bible mentioning about the sociological impacts of homosexuality, although it does explicitly condemns homosexuality. Perhaps there might indeed be long-term sociological repercussions that are not intuitively evident to human minds, and religion simply provides the red flags on the areas which are to be threaded at one’s own risk. Indeed, what seems to be the approach towards the homosexuality issue by the Singapore government is to observe impact of the legalization of homosexuality in other countries before determining whether it wants to follow in the same suit.

Perhaps there may not be any negative sociological impact at all, and homosexuality can be normalized as an acceptable part of societal culture without the so-feared ‘unraveling of the foundation of society’. A country can still grow in strength, and maintain a healthy environment. The only change is that homosexuality has become a normal part of lifestyle, in the same sense as heterosexual relationships are in the present. Homosexual people kiss, hold hands, do things together in public. Television shows and movies portray on a regular basis romantic relationships between individuals of similar genders in the same light as how heterosexual romantic relationships are portrayed today, and couples and families watch them for their outings together. But perhaps, the normalizing of homosexuality into culture is the blemish to society, at least how some conservatives would see it.