If so, why should same-sex partners not be viewed the same way?
All children are gifts from God and deserve our care and protection. The stable, life long loving relationship of a mother and father, found only in marriage, provides the ideal conditions for raising and socializing children. Marriage represents the way we teach and reinforce this ideal.
Of course, some children are raised in situations other than the traditional two-parent family, and responsible loving single parents, and other family members make important and valuable contributions to the welfare of these children. But supporting single-parent families, as a just and
compassionate society must do, is far different than deliberately creating motherless and fatherless families and holding them out to be the same as marriages.