The traditional vision of marriage in the USA is based on admitting the union of a man and a woman who love each other. Love and affection are discussed as the basic reasons for marriage. As a result, the purposes or functions of marriage are reproduction, protection, affection, and provision of social status. Same-sex marriages cannot guarantee reproduction and protection because of a lot of controversies associated with the issue and the public’s attitude to the problem.
Discussing the idea of same sex marriage, Diane Savino focuses on the quality of people’s relations in marriage. Savino states that the fact of marriage cannot guarantee love, affection, respect, and positive relations, and the level of divorces is too high to speak about the role of marriage as a social protector. This statement is correlated with the acknowledged idea that the public’s acceptance of divorce becomes higher. Thus, the idea of marriage is not connected with the idea of the quality of people’s relations.
According to Savino, those people who have the ‘privilege of marriage’ cannot teach society to preserve the values proclaimed by the social and religious institutions because of violating them regularly. On the contrary, the decision of same-sex couples is considered and based on love and commitment to each other. The traditional vision of marriage is still actively supported in society in spite of changes in attitudes to the role of marriage. Following Savino’s ideas, it is possible to state that same-sex marriages are fairer in comparison with traditional marriages, but this vision is too provocative to be supported in society.