So it seems New York is getting ready to legalize same sex marriage.

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Another undecided New York senator says he will vote for gay marriage, adding momentum to the state's effort to become the sixth in the nation to legalize same-sex unions.

Do I care? Not much, it doesn't affect me. What bothers me is this: for the gay community, it's still not enough. What, they ask, about the gays that don't want to be married?

Here’s why I’m worried: Winning the right to marry is one thing; being forced to marry is quite another. How’s that? If the rollout of marriage equality in other states, like Massachusetts, is any guide, lesbian and gay people who have obtained health and other benefits for their domestic partners will be required by both public and private employers to marry their partners in order to keep those rights. In other words, “winning” the right to marry may mean “losing” the rights we have now as domestic partners, as we’ll be folded into the all-or-nothing world of marriage.

Not to worry, though. The concerned "director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School" has this all figured out for us, and better than all of history to boot.

As strangers to marriage for so long, we’ve created loving and committed forms of family, care and attachment that far exceed, and often improve on, the narrow legal definition of marriage. Many of us are not ready to abandon those nonmarital ways of loving once we can legally marry.

Okay, by this theory, all loving and committed relationships, be they called marriage or something else, need to be treated equally under the law. Brothers and sisters are loving and committed, as are fathers and daughters. Heck, even roommates qualify under this definition.

And this is the problem in my eyes. In equating virtually any co-habitation with marriage, we will ultimately degrade the meaning of marriage.

Althouse comments as well.