[quote name='BigT']I fully agree with what BeBop wrote on this issue...
1) You have to also satisfy the requirement that the right to be granted is a laudable one. For example, Bernie Madoff and other investment crooks would probably like us to legalize ponzi schemes and other shady deals. Doing so would grant him a right that would make him happy, however, it would not be beneficial for society. Thus, if you look at it from the point of view of someone who believes that homosexual marriages are detrimental to society, then the argument is logically consistent. I personally don't care if homosexuals get married... however, I see the fight for homosexual marriage for what it really is... an attack on the traditional nuclear family and another nail in the coffin of our society being hammered by so called progressives.[/quote]
You're living in candy land if you think that the majority of households, definable as "families," are of the "nuclear" sort in the US currently. Your argument lies on a faulty understanding of demographics, so it's logically flawed. And it values the individual viewpoint of those who are against gay marriage differently; it's weighted, giving some people's opinions more dominion and value than others. Third, the premise of the "attack" on the nuclear family is a strawman wholly without merit, as your claim is based on speculation and a motive you cannot provide a justification for, nor prove - that the "Attack" by progressives on "your way of life" (which is a fabrication of demographic reality, mind you) is more concerned with killing off how you live versus getting rights for themselves and letting you live your life.
Life like people in a free society have.
2) Definitions of words change and are somewhat arbitrary. However, we use words to describe concepts. If we look throughout history, I'm sure that we would see many more instances of marriage referring to the union b/w a man and a woman that that between two men or two women. We could expand the definition, but then the word would lose some precision... but, at least for me, it's not the word that matters...
Yeah...I figured someone would go there. Given the number of states that voted to prohibit same-sex marriages in 2004 and 2006, the delicious irony of the successful passage of state statutes is that they, through some brilliant wording, managed to not only disallow same-sex marriages, but also the legal recognition of "common-law" marriages. Which is a death blow to the idea of tradition, given the definition of "common-law" (law rooted not in the written code, but in traditional social practice). If the common-law traditional recognition of marriage was rebuked, well, then, I consider that to be, legally, an abandonment of heterosexuals' claim to usage rights for the word marriage.