For the annals of bad analogies. After the NYT wrote an editorial favoring gay marriage, the Executive Director of the New York Christian Coalition, Rev. Bill Banuchi, wrote in to offer an analogy to show how recognizing gay marriage hurts traditional marriage:

If I have an ounce of gold and the government suddenly announces that sandstone will now be called gold and valued equally, what will happen to the value of my gold? It will crash, and so will the economy.

So will it be with gay marriage. Marriage will be further devalued, and so will our entire social order.

I suspect the Times chose this letter because it is such a monumentally bad analogy. Gold is, obviously, not like marriage, because people have an interest in accumulating quantities of gold, but each person can only have one other person in the marriage market. Once you have your one, you have no interest in whether someone else also has one. You have no interest in maintaining the scarcity of marriage, because there is no less value in your relationship to another person if other people also have relationships. In fact, you're better off if other people are also securely paired off, because then rivals for your spouse are less likely to interfere with your relationship. Preserving the scarcity of a traded good like gold may bolster its price, but there is no equivalent point where you "sell" your marriage.

Banuchi's attitude toward government labeling also doesn't make sense. If the government were to say "sandstone will now be called gold and valued equally," as long as I could see the two products and choose my vendor, I would still buy the real gold. Who would buy sandstone at the price of gold? In fact, people would stop buying sandstone at all if government fixed its price at the same level as gold! If somehow people did want to buy sandstone at the price of gold, it must be because they have found some amazing quality to standstone that inspires them to buy it. Thus, Banuchi may think that a gay relationship is like a worthless stone compared to gold, but if people are choosing it over heterosexual marriage when both impose the same obligations, it must be because they have found real value in it. It would not be the government labeling that caused that value to come into being, but the experiences of the people engaging in the relationship.

UPDATE: If you read this earlier, you might have seen that I had "diamonds" instead of gold at one point. That was caused by bad editing. I was going to offer Banuchi the tip that he'd have a better analogy if he used diamonds and cubic zirconium instead of gold and sandstone, because there would be some potential to mistake one for the other. That got too complicated and I'd meant to take it out. Sorry.