How is that something you could use to say I'm wrong? You might say it was a complex marriage, but it's still a marriage between man and woman, maybe 800 times (solomon?) but it's still man and woman. Produce a source for a man/man, woman/woman "marriage" in antiquity that isn't fiction, although I don't know of one in fiction either.
You miss the point, it is not a traditional marriage, as you say it is a "complex marriage" -- far more complex than the simple idea of two people joining their future together to create a life together. You create complex sub-relationships (today commonly referred to as "sister wives") of two people who are not "married" but in a common marital relationship. It stretches and changes the meaning a whole lot more than two people of the same gender getting married because each "couple" is not a separate and distinct group. rather it is "married" to other people through a subset of the total group.
To me, it seems you are trying to make marriage mean what you want it to mean, which is why you want to ignore other "lesser" meanings of marriage. The fact is, marriage in English has the idea (even among lesser meanings) of two things being permanently joined together.
Not to mention, I don't think there is any English speaking person who doesn't immediately understand what is meant when we talk of two same sex people being married. And it is not gays only that use it that way, precisely because the word (and no other similar word) causes the listener to immediately understand exactly the relationship being talked about.
To me, your arguing that gays shouldn't use the word "marriage" is equivalent to the idea that the word "fly" never should have been used to refer to aviation. People can't "fly" according to the traditional definition. But, like marriage, when aviation came about the word "fit" the new topic. People immediately understood what was being talked about -- the word evolved, much like the word marriage has evolved to include two people of the same sex.
And there have been alternative words invented to refer to gay marriage and the "problem" is no one uses them. Denmark has never had gay "marriage", instead they have had about two decades of civil unions -- and they were years in front of other countries. What happened? People call people who get civil unions married, not because of any gay lobby but rather because it is the word that makes people immediately understand the relationship being talked about.
Yeah, that was / is wrong. Has nothing to do with the meaning of the word, or how historically the word was used. It's simply an appeal to emotion.
Why? Because you think so? The fact is, though, it directly is in conflict with our "English" (language) definition of marriage. There is the who Christian "forsake all others" subtext of marriage in cultures that speak English as a primary language. Having another party that is used for sex is considered adultery. While mistresses are known to exist, they are looked down upon (far different from traditional concubines) as a form of prostitute and home wrecker.
If someone has killed 45 people for being mean to them before, it would not justify me to do it today.
Doesn't matter. Especially since murderers can still marry.
Because men took concubines historically, would not mean it was allowed today, nor just today, etc...
so what. has nothing to do with this convo.
If you wish to use it for justification, then I'll use the same principal with, "many cultures did human sacrifice. I will sacrifice you and other's that share your thoughts on this topic until the God's speak and say to stop." Same argument, applied from a different angle. This is the concept of PRECEDENT. If it's just for your position, then it must be a principal that is just in other applications as well.
The point is, this is tied to our understanding of marriage, even in English speaking countries. True, concubines aren't allowed today, per se (though there have been plenty of men in English speaking history with mistresses, which are essentially the same), it is a part of our historical understanding of the word.
And it doesn't really matter, anyway. As I pointed out, words in language change through time to embrace new concepts, new memes, and new inventions. The word "fly", as I pointed out, is a great example. They took a word that originally was used to talk of a creature who, through its own power, moved through the sky and evolved (first with balloons and later with machines) to include people who use devices in order to move through the sky.
I've never seen it. I'm willing to be corrected, where can I look into that claim. Did they call it the egyptian equivalent of Marriage? If they didn't, it wouldn't apply to the history of the world. No one in this conversation has suggested gay couples never existed, we are discussing the meaning of the word marriage.
Show me. Show me they used an equivalent term to "marriage". I'm not denying there were unions, couplings, commitments etc...
Again, I'm willing to be wrong. but I don't think the situations above is apples to apples.
I grant you, fully and forever, there have been homosexual events, and assume relations forever. We agree on that. Show me they were called marriage. You have to for it to apply to this conversation. And you said it happened with a license in one culture, but I'd like to study that before agreeing or disagreeing.
In the truly ancient cultures we don't know how the relationships were named or how identical or different they were with opposite sex marriage. What we know (from the Egyptians and Chinese) is that they had same sex couples buried and identified in the same manner as opposite sex couples. The fact that they were buried in the same manner suggests they may have been "married" but we have little evidence to go on.
The Romans is really the first culture where we have actual evidence. Most of it stems from the Emperors Nero and Elagabalus, since records about the Emperors have survived better than others. There are records of marriages of other same-sex couples up to the time they were outlawed by the Christian Emperors Constantius II and Constans.
As for the North American tribe, they typically occurred when a man chose to live as a woman -- in these cases the "woman" lived as a woman in all ways, including a marriage as a woman to a man. Though it is also clear that in many tribes these "Two Spirit" men (as some tribes called them) had a type of enhanced status, often becoming the shaman for the tribe.
If you want to find out more, you can start with the
Wikipedia entry and the citations for that article. Forgive me for not finding my sources as I don't recall the names of the books and don't choose to take the time to find my sources at this time.
But to go back on point, the fact is it doesn't matter that "marriage" has traditionally meant man and woman per the English definition. People are too lazy to want to use some new word, especially when the understanding of the old word (especially when you include the minor definition "an intimate or close union") so easily lends itself. People naturally understand when we talk of two men being married, they don't get blank looks and misunderstand what is being talked about. And most people, even before gay marriage became legal, still commonly referred to couples as civil unions as married.
