Same sex marriage

[genkaus]

It's not simply about giving a definition. The whole exercise is to show that we all accept general definitions even when there is exceptions to the general definition. You accept the general definition of male and female even with the knowledge that some conditions exist that do not comply with the general rule. In the same way we can say that male-female unions are procreative in principal, whilst having exceptions. The exceptions do not invalidate the general rule, that's the issue. Same sex unions are not procreative in principal. You can't have it both ways, either the exceptions do invalidate the general rule, in which case give a new definition of male and female that incorporates the exceptions or admit that the exceptions do not invalidate the general rule, which is it?

That is where you are mistaken. We accept the general rules in spite of exceptions if and only if no better option to that general rule is available. Even though the exceptions invalidate the rule, we often have to ignore them and treat that invalid definition as valid, simply because a better definition is not available. A good parallel here is Newtonian mechanics. Exceptions which did not fit the Newtonian model were known for a long time, but it was still used because we didn't have anything better. Once we got relativity, we started using that.