YOU MAY HAVE SEEN THE FLIERS AROUND campus if you’ve been around the last few days — “10 Reasons Why Homosexual ‘Marriage’ is Harmful and Must be Opposed.â€Â The fliers come from The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, which appears to be a fringe Catholic group interested primarily in denying homosexual couples the right to marriage and halting the (evidently) rapid spread of communism.

Groups like this drive me up the wall, and not just because I disagree with their cause. I have attended Catholic churches since I was a child, and so realize that this sort of campaigning reflects poorly on the whole religion. Fortunately, not all Catholics are this uptight or angry. Not all Catholics are interested in twisting the language of the Bible, reappropriating it for the cause of oppressing large groups of America.

Not one of the ten reasons the flier gives for its opposition ever approaches anything like a good argument, but one of the most ridiculous assertions is the notion that the primary aim of marriage is to reproduce and raise children.

Of course, this is not the same standard the public at large, including these ostensibly Christian activist groups, applies to heterosexual marriages. There is not another group in America for which activists demand a biological child as validation of that marriage.

Nobody ever seems to get up in arms about the great travesty that is childless heterosexual marriages.

Nobody throws a fit about post-menopausal women marrying or remarrying their geriatric boyfriends.

Nobody does this because we realize how silly it is to define a “goodâ€Â or “validâ€Â marriage as one that must produce offspring.

Nobody does this because we realize marriage is about something more, something much more.

And that something is something all couples can possess: gay, straight or anything in between.

Mathew Gomes is a senior majoring in English as well as music, with an emphasis in composition.