A stupid argument

I don’t like Michael Steele’s effort to position gay marriage as an economic concern.  I’m feeling mentally muddy right now, and can’t put my finger on it, but I know that’s something wrong with his argument.  My first feeling is that, if these same gay people suddenly turned straight and married someone of the opposite sex, they’d also put insurance demands on business.  Either way, straight or gay, it’s the same people getting insurance.  I’m not sure, though, if that’s the fatal flaw in Steele’s argument.

What I do know is that, with polygamy, there is a huge problem, which is already showing up in England, which recognizes wives from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.  There, for every worker, you have to provide insurance or care for 2 or 3 or 5 other non-workers.

The deal with family health care is that we contemplate a societal benefit:  he works, she raises children.  He contributes economically, she contributes demographically and societally.  That’s less true with gay marriage, but not in significant numbers, and one partner in that marriage could still be a stay at home spouse raising children.  With polygamy, while it’s true in a private insurance system that one partner is working, the home balance is wrong.  Instead of one working and one raising children, you have one working and way too many staying at home.  As a society, we have a vested interested in producing happy, healthy children, but this works only if people don’t over-burden the system.  There’s got to be proportion between financial producers and wives and progeny.  With polygamy, that proportionality vanishes.

Ah!  Must run.  Meanwhile, will one of you dear people please clarify for me what I’m struggling with here?