Whenever the issue of gay marriage comes up, you’ll often hear the opponents talk of it meaning “re-defining marriage”.
Does it really mean that?
I’m not so sure. All I ever heard all my life was that you were supposed to marry the person you fell in love with. For a long time, this has always been the standard. Now, society assumed for centuries that you could only have romantic love between a man and a woman. But gays obviously show that is not the case. So, if you have two people of the same gender in romantic love, the logic suggests they should be allowed to marry, under the current definition.
Of course, marriage was not always based on romantic love. In other cultures through history, there have been examples of arranged marriages, or marriages made to cement some treaty or alliance between families or some such. So, it’s true that at some point, a re-definition of marriage went on. But it obviously happened quite some time ago; as for centuries now people have been getting married based on love.
I talked before in this post about why opponents of gay marriage use the Bible to justify their position. And I’ll say this: given the circumstances of the tribes wandering in the desert, the Biblical prohibition of homosexuality makes sense. The mortality rate must have been extremely high back then, so I figure they knew that they needed everyone who could reproduce to do so, regardless of preference. “Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, and all that.
But of course, that was then, and this is now.
The same sort of thing applies to this “re-definition” claim. It would be right if this were five hundred years ago.