That's a false analogy. The government has a different responsibility to it's citizens than you would have to two of your friends. You are free to treat your friend differently based on any arbitrary criteria you choose...it's a relationship that is an extremely poor model for understanding how government works. The fact that you would bring something like that up, does not bode well for your argument that your ability to reason is intact.
The Government has a responsibility to treat all of it's citizens exactly the same. If it treats one group differently it has to have some pretty solid reasons. In the United States, the "default action" is that you are free to pursue your life as you wish unless the state has a compelling reason to stop you...furthermore if the Government extends some privilege to some ALL must have the opportunity to pursue it, if only in theory.
> There is nothing to take away; gay rights activists are not just asking to be left alone
This is extremely specious reasoning. By that rationale many atrocities of history are justified...the slaves wanted us to expand our definition of "human" and "free man".
> Furthermore, no punishment is made due to "brain chemistry"; we are not testing individuals and discarding them based on the presence of certain biological markers (either externally or internally visible)
This is based on an extremely dubious and narrow definition of "punishment".
> We are simply choosing that we do not want to incentivize, endorse, or equalize permanent homosexual coupling as we do with permanent heterosexual coupling.
Yes precisely. Except the government can't just randomly decide to "incentivize" one life style over another for no particular reason. We "incentiveize" a murder-free life style because it's necessary to have a functioning society.
There's absolutely no evidence that homosexuality is harmful to individuals or society at large. There's no reason to actively discriminate against it, which is what is going on.
At some point in time, some group of people sat down and decided marriage was between a man and a woman...that was an act of actively discriminating against another group of people. It's natural that it takes an action to rectify it....just as slavery couldn't be stopped by all the white people suddenly deciding to be nice to black people.
The sorry state of marriage rights in this country exists only by virtue of how indifferent and ignorant the general population is. The good news is that just as we look back in horror at the times we burned people at the stake, the people of the future will look back at the time we finally started to respect people's personal lifestyle choices. Unfortunately, they will probably be seeking comfort from some new horror.