That’s why it’s a redefinition. If the issue wasn’t even considered, how could have it been part of any definition of “marriage”? Except if you intend to argue that marriage was previously some fuzzy, vague and undefined concept.
It’s a social institution . Maybe the concept doesn’t exist in English and I misused the word, but somehow I doubt it. Marriage is a major element of the social organization and social order, regulated by the authorities. It’s the official and social recognition of a status, personal and in relation with another or several others persons. It creates opposable rights and obligations. It’s an institution.
They might talk about companionship and sex, but you don’t need marriage for that, except if the law prevents you from, for instance, cohabiting when you’re not married, in which case it shows again that marriage is about law, rights and personal status. By marrying someone, you’re asking for a social, official and often religious sanction of your status, and for the rights associated to it.
If it weren’t the case, you wouldn’t have to ask for a gay marriage. You’d just tell people “we’re married”, or simply : “that’s my boyfriend”. People who want gays to be allowed to marry don’t want them to be able to enjoy companionship and sex. They already can. They want a legal and social recognition of their relation, and the rights attached to the institution of marriage.
The legal definition of marriage is fairly crisp yet frequently changed in some way or another (and even today, not at all uniform across the world; thus, in some sense, globally fuzzy all the same). The ordinary language concept of marriage is, like almost all ordinary language concepts, fuzzy (when we look at the concept of marriage independent of its legal recognition); note that this fuzziness does not make it meaningless, anymore than concepts like “game” and “friends” are made meaningless by their fuzziness. “Marriage” has a meaning, and that meaning is fuzzy; we should not blind ourselves to this fact.
To put it another way, if the ordinary language definition of marriage is taken to be “A relationship given the legal name ‘marriage’”, then this definition would not be changed. The business of what the legal terminology “marriage” refers to might have some particulars modified, but this happens all the time, and is even today something which fluctuates from location to location, making it hardly anything to get worked up over, anymore than changes in the jargon of the tax code or sentencing guidelines.
This is easy. If I say “Richard and Jose are getting married this weekend.”, is there any ambiguity about what just happened or the nature of their relationship?
No. Any English speaker is going to have a pretty clear picture of what I am talking about. Right now it is illegal for sixteen year olds to drink, but if we changed the drinking laws to allow that, that wouldn’t change the definition of “drinking”.
I just wanted to say that I’ve never quite been able to wrap my mind around why anyone opposes gay marriage beyond religious (it’s a sin!) or more nefarious reasons, but this finally sunk in for me. Much like the asterisk in baseball statistics that denote a record set under the influence of steroids or something, it’s because they want everyone to realize it’s not equal to the regular ol’ kind. < light bulb going on > So thank you, thank you, thank you for helping me to ‘get’ it.
We could just as easily ask, how could it have been excluded from the definition of marriage? Male-female is a presumption based on the presumption that there are no homosexuals or homosexual relationships worthy of acceptance.
And why does the alternative to male-female always have to be “fuzzy, vague and undefined” and chaotic? Love, sex, exclusivity, lifelong commtment, cohabitation, these things are in place. From there it’s simply a matter of assigning gender roles based on 1 of 2 possible sexual orentations.
Fine, but my point is that some kinds of institutions are vulnerable to destruction if one key element is altered. Marriage is not that kind of institution. People are blurring the distinction between the abstract archetype and the forces that actually motivate millions of people in their real lives.
Which is what makes this an issue of discrimination.
Marriage today is not about commitment. Last I heard, 50% of marriages fail and that is a lot higher than marriages without children, marriages without sex, and marriages without romance.
As far as I’m concerned, the Christian right lost the battle supporting traditional marriage years ago.
Right. But given the prevelance of divorce, raising children out of wedlock, living together, simply staying single, it’s absurd to argue that the real threat to marriage is allowing gays to marry.
To put the issue another way: If we were to make a change in the laws of physics, everything would suddenly turn inside out because the structure of everything depends on the laws of physics being constant. Some people see the civil laws defining marriage in terms of the same principle. But the forces that maintain the stability of marriage in society are endemic to the human condition, not dependent on how the government interprets things.
The good old heterosexual sex drive is alive and well and has a lot to do with what drives people into relationships with members of the opposite gender. And similar forces have been seen driving homosexuals into relationships even as the proportion of gays to straights remains constant.
And yet sex brings with it a biological imperative that can drive relationships apart, in that people–especially males–come to desire additional sexual partners. And so deep cultural forces exist to keep these tendencies tamped down by heavily frowning upon cheating and abandonment. The government plays a role here, as does religion, and yet these forces have weakened somewhat, as have those that would compel marriage in the event of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy or would block a couple from living in what used to be called sin.
But no weakening of cultural or legal forces is going to compel people to go bat for the other team. Or for that matter, want to marry siblings or children or animals or, with just a few exceptions, multiple spouses. So there are some predilections that need to be controlled by customs and/or laws, and some that come naturally.