"Jesus would rather kill, not marry, gay people" - Franklin Graham

[SteveII]

I'm gonna let dictionary.com complete the destruction of RR's and Steve's "arguments" by definition about marriage.

All emphasis is mine:

Marriage has never had just one meaning. Adjectives commonly used with the word reveal the institution’s diversity, among them traditional, religious, civil, arranged, gay, plural, group, open, heterosexual, common-law, interracial, same-sex, polygamous, and monogamous. And this diversity has been in evidence, if not since the beginning of time, at least since the beginning of marriage itself, roughly some 4000 years ago.
Multiple wives, for example, proliferate in the Bible. King Solomon famously had 700, although most were apparently instruments of political alliance rather than participants in royal romance. (For that, he had 300 concubines.)
Marriage can be sanctioned legally or religiously, and typically confers upon married people a special legal status with particular rights, benefits, and obligations. Access to this special status has changed over time. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage as recently as 1967, while same-sex marriage, which for some time had been banned in many states or ignored in others, was in 2015 ruled a constitutional right for all Americans.
Marriage as the union of one man and one woman is the most common definition of the term in the Western world today—this in spite of the prevalence on the one hand of divorce (enabling people to marry several different partners in sequence), and on the other, of an increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage. And as society becomes more inclusive, it is likely that “equal protection under the law” will be fully applied to same-sex couples.
In crafting definitions for a word that represents an institution that is rapidly evolving, the dictionary may well have to keep adding, changing, and reordering senses, splitting or combining them as the institution changes. Inevitably, those who want to preserve what they cherish as traditional values will resist new definitions, while those who anticipate, welcome, and fight for societal change will be impatient when new definitions do not appear as quickly as they would wish. But we should all remember that while it is not the job of a dictionary to drive social change, it is inevitable that it will reflect such change.

RR, Steve, sorry, but you guys lose. You see, that's the problem with communicating by means of a living language. Definitions change, pronunciations change, spelling changes... Might I suggest you both learn Latin if definitions are such a hot button for you. It's a dead language, so you won't have that to deal with. Of course, you'll be stuck in a modern world with no way to communicate modern ideas, but you both seem to be there already.

LOL. That people have to put qualifiers in front of the word 'marriage' if they don't mean marriage! Do you think anyone in the 20th century uttered the phrase 'heterosexual marriage' to make sure everyone was clear on what they meant?! You are proving my point!

Are you going to stick with the 4000 year number? Are you sure you want to do that?

---

Fine.  Then it's just your preference.  Nobody gives a shit about your preference unless it rests on a rational foundation.  If this is just your preference, then fuck off.

Look back all the way through. My point has always been that a preference to the old definition of marriage does not equate to bigotry. People have spent 40 pages unsuccessfully trying to prove that it does. I would have stopped long ago, but you know how this works, a new batch of people take up the cause and rehash everything again.  They can't figure out why they can't prove what they have been told--all who opposed gay marriage are bigots.