My wife and I pay more taxes because we are married without children. If we were not married and filed as singles, our tax burden would be much less. But IDK really, mostly because I enjoy living in a working society and that means paying taxes.
All tax benefits, from marriage tax deductions to corporate tax elimination, is the government picking and choosing which behaviors it wants to encourage.
That's why conservatives didn't want gay people to get married because they saw it as government endorsement of their behavior, and not the government recognizing equal rights.
Public equality and public liberty are the responsibility and purview of government. If they are not, we can't really have government by consent. Instead we have hegemony in which the lower strata are governed by force.
That still sounds like discrimination to me. Same sex couples still have the ability to adopt, use IVF with a donor, use a surrogate, etc. All of these encourage raising children, but they're ineligible for benefits because they aren't a hetero couple?
You see, I'm on board with that logic right up until there are childless hetero couples. I think if a gay couple plans to adopt they should get the exact same privileges.
Or maybe a marriage only gets the tax break if they prove they are raising a child. Otherwise straight childless marriages still benefit from the tax break while childless gay marriages do not. If more kids are the goal, make kids the deciding factor for the tax break.