I don't understand...is it just there to point out that the Sims that got married were gay or something? Also, I read on Sims Wiki that Sims who had a want to get a "joined union" in their wants panels got fewer aspiration points than the Sims who wanted to "get married." Is this true?

Well, I do know in sims 3 it's get married for gay sims. But back when sims 2 was made gay marriage wasn't legal. So they probably didn't want to spark contraversey. I think they have a mod that changes it to "get married". But I don't know

Who can tell what the developers or their corporate masters were thinking?

Although many people here have stated, and said they've proven by experimentation, that gay marriages net fewer points than marriage, the two gay marriages so far in my game have been indistinguishable in all ways from the straight ones; and I know for a fact that in my game other point variations (such as, family sims get 8000 points for marriage and other aspirations get 5000) which other people have demonstrated in their own games do not hold in mine. I have a picture of the moment in which one fortune sim got married, and you can see him putting up 8000 points. Other people on here have stated that their gay sims put up wants that use the term "marry" and "wedding." So I think there may be subtle edition and EP changes to a number of features over time, depending on - who knows what, the whim of the receptionist at EA or something.

There really is no point in second-guessing this stuff.

I guess it's so as not to tick us fundies off too much. :P

(I always have opposite-sex couples, just because an option is there, doesn't mean I'm obliged to use it.)

That would be an incredibly dumb reasoning. Playing as and/or having Sims in homosexual relationships is 100% optional in The Sims 2.

Thankfully the Same-Sex Marriage hack exists, and I have that.

The only thing that miffed me is that there is no wedding dresses for males. XD Sorry but I tried to make my male friend a sim and I've always wanted to see him get hitched in a wedding dress (he looks better in dresses then I do :P)

Seriously, you got miffed over that? As if the developers should have anticipated every single outside-the-mainstream thing players could come up with and be sure to accomodate them all?

Impossible to do, and unrealistic to expect. Also what CC is for. Catering to the non-mainstream player is a big part of why a lot of CC creators do what they do, and I bet you could find a wedding dress for males out there somewhere. If not, then there must not be much demand for it, making it even sillier for you to have expected EA to know you'd want this.

As for why the creators made joined unions for same-sex couples instead of marriage, I agree with whomever it was that suggested it's because that reflects the reality of law in most of the world at the time the game was developed.

MY question isn't why they differentiated between the two, but why they didn't give equal time, in terms of aspirational benefits and such, to joined unions as to marriages. Seems like it would have to be either bias, or oversight in coding. I tend to favor the latter theory, simply because they did a really good job making potentially controversial aspects of the game (same-sex couples, "creatures", premarital woohoo, to name a few) to be totally player-controlled, giving the impression (to me, anyway) that they wanted to be careful not to inject too much of a particular moral tone to the game. Instead, they arranged these things in ways that let players decide how to play that best suits their own morality.

So it doesn't seem likely to me that they were trying to make some kind of anti-gay statement with the "joined union" thing OR trying not to piss off any fundies. Rather that choosing the term available in real life at the time would have been the most neutral stance they could have taken.

I was just being sarcastic.

I play the way I see fit, others play the way they like, c'est la vie. After all, it's a "simulation," right?

The Sims 2 was released in 2004, and a lot of things have changed in just seven years. Back then, Massachusetts was the only state in the country where same-sex marriage was legal, and there were only two countries in world (Netherlands and Belgium) where it was legal nationwide. Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court case that struck down all sodomy laws, happened only the past year, in 2003. At the time of the ruling, homosexuality was still illegal in 14 states. Back in 2004, homosexuality was a sensitive issue, and incredible progress has been made since then. The political climate of the time would not have allowed EA to publish a game incorporating same-sex marriage without a firestrorm of controversy. By 2009, the year The Sims 3 was published, so much had changed already. Same-sex marriage had been legalized in Connecticut, Iowa, and Vermont, as well as Canada, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, and Norway. Within five years, the climate had changed so that EA could publish a game incorporating same-sex marriage and garner more praise than condemnation.

Sims 3 wasn't released in 2004...

^ My bad, I meant The Sims 2. I'll edit it.