OK, I read this after all the celibacy/non-procreation talk, and though he meant Victorian Era, and was like "There's going to be hooking up whilst thinking of England? What?"

Hum... standing around in elegant clothes making jokes about bad poetry and using words like effulgent... you might not be able to tell the difference.

Edit: not that I've ever been to a Buffista F2F *or* a Victorian party. But I've read stories!

As far as I'm aware, the survival of the species is not actually under threat in any case. Well, not from lack of procreation in any case.

Totally. You'd think from a public policy perspective, leaders should be encouraging gay marriage as a small step to check overpopulation.

The problem, Susan, is that the 'important' countries, ie the industrialized west, already have near zero growth rates. Several European countries would have negative growth rates if it wasn't for immigration. Which just makes them all twitchy.

It's all the 'unimportant' countries that have unchecked growth rates (in Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent Latin America). But not to worry, with some sub-saharan African countries with AIDs infection rates up to 20% of their population, that problem won't be for much longer...

I know, and I was basically being tongue-in-cheek. But while I can understand being concerned about the demographics of a specific country or region, because an aging population puts a strain on national resources, expressing concern about the survival of the species is just laughable. If humans ever go extinct, it won't be for lack of fecundity.

In my neighborhood is a partnership of a lesbian couple and a gay male couple, who combined their genes in the typical way and all four are raising a child together. Double gay and procreating! Frankly, having four parents has to be a lot less stressful on the family. Spread that responsibility around.

I know a couple-couple like that too. They live next door to each other and have now had two children together, although I can't remember how the biological labour was divided.

Four parents would certainly help when it's time to pay for college!

I'll accept their reasoning when fertility tests become part of the legal requirement for marriage. Otherwise, what's the point? (Do I need to add a sarcasm tag? I think it can be assumed.)

And Hec reminds me now that of my friends who have recently procreated, several are gay couples. (One is the minister of our church, btw, who was married in the church. Even when religious reasons are cited for why this is so wrong, wrong, wrong, it's important to remember that there is far from consensus on this issue, even within a particular faith.)

In addition to the predictable reaction of Huh!!??!! to the whole 'because it doesn't help the survival of the species' argument against Gay Marriage, I must need register my amusement that the intereview in question took place in a Darwin radio station.

Statistics have shown that the more education a woman has, the later she marries and the fewer children she has. So all these worried countries should stop allowing their females to waste their fertile years in college and building a career, and get them breeding as soon as possible, though only if they're already married, and if they're single, they better somehow manage to bring in enough money for themselves.

And yeah, legalizing gay marriage could help raise childbirth rates, since one of the things that keeps some gay couples from having children is the difficulty of arranging health care, insurance, legal custody, etc. since legally they're two single adults. If they didn't have to worry about second parent adoption, and they could get their man-in-a-can paid for the way heterosexual couples get some of their fertility drugs for free, there could be a lot more babies born.