Buzzfeed:

A federal trial court ruled that Nevada can limit marriage to opposite-sex couples in a ruling made public hours before the Supreme Court is due to consider whether it will hear any of several cases addressing same-sex couples’ marriage rights.Judge Robert C. Jones, a George W. Bush appointee, found that the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws does not “[prohibit] the People of the State of Nevada from maintaining statutes that reserve the institution of civil marriage to one-man–one-woman relationships.”

You know what. If your decision whether to marry your high school sweetheart hinges on whether Kevin and Steve down the block can get married too, then maybe you shouldn’t be getting married in the first place.

Here’s some of his ruling, the entire thing is at the bottom of this post:

“Should that institution [civil marriage] be expanded to include same-sex couples with the state’s imprimatur, it is conceivable that a meaningful percentage of heterosexual persons would cease to value the civil institution as highly as they previously had and hence enter into it less frequently, opting for purely private ceremonies, if any, whether religious or secular, but in any case without civil sanction, because they no longer wish to be associated with the civil institution as redefined,7 leading to an increased percentage of out-of-wedlock children, single-parent families, difficulties in property disputes after the dissolution of what amount to common law marriages in a state where such marriages are not recognized, or other unforeseen consequences.”

And don’t forget sun spots. I understand gay people cause sun spots too.

Right before that quote, Judge Robert Jones, who’s a Mormon (see discussion about this further down), seems to suggest that if gays are permitted to marry, the entire human race could end (though, let’s face it, it would end FABULOUSLY). Let me dissect his deep philosophical analysis:

Human beings are created through the conjugation of one man and one woman.

Conjugation? I think he means he likes to use “Hooked on Phonics” as foreplay. (Those wacky Mormons.)

The percentage of human beings conceived through non-traditional methods is minuscule, and adoption, the form of child-rearing in which same-sex couples may typically participate together, is not an alternative means of creating children, but rather a social backstop for when traditional biological families fail. The perpetuation of the human race depends upon traditional procreation between men and women. The institution developed in our society, its predecessor societies, and by nearly all societies on Earth throughout history to solidify, standardize, and legalize the relationship between a man, a woman, and their offspring, is civil marriage between one man and one woman. See Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190,211 (1888) (“It is an institution, in the maintenance of which in its purity the public is deeply interested, for it is the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would beneither civilization nor progress.”).

Actually, to be precise, the institution developed in our society, its predecessor societies, and by nearly all societies on Earth throughout history to solidify, standardize, and legalize the relationship between a man, a woman, and their offspring, is civil marriage between two people of the same race, and even better, the same nationality and/or ethnicity. And I don’t recall white people leaving the institution of marriage because blacks were permitted to marry their women, and vice versa.

And let me go back to the fact that Judge Jones is a Mormon, because it’s relevant. The institution developed in Mormon society to solidify, standardize, and legalize the relationship between a man, a woman, and their offspring, was polygamous marriage.

Now, you could certainly argue that forcing the Mormons to change their definition of marriage, to limit marriage to only the conjugation, as he likes to put it, of one man and one woman, rather than one man and a whole slew of women, minimized and lessened marriage in the eyes of Mormons. And thus, Mormons would have stopped getting married and stopped procreating because it just wasn’t the very very special thing it used to be.

Yet, I don’t recall a dearth of births among Mormons over the past hundred years, do you?

I just find it interesting that a Mormon judge is arguing about millennia of marriage tradition when in fact, that tradition, in his own faith, in which he has served as a bishop, changed in the last 100 years, and no one’s worse for the wear, and he knows it.