It is both mine and our society's definition. If you can convince a majority of the population (the public's will is expressed in our laws) to accept your definition of marriage, then that view will prevail.
I will be satisfied to go with the majority view and I think the other side should also.
I'm all for living and let living. But changing the definition of a long established important institution - the burden is on the side of those advocating a radical change to convince the rest of society to go along with it. Merely trying to bully people by throwing insults at them isn't persuasive and is frankly counter-productive IMO.
What might be persuasive over a long period of time is if a significant number of gay people in some place committed to living in long-term stable responsible relationships and the results of that could be studied giving society a reasonable basis for making predictions about the change for the overall society.
Here is something that speaks to this:
Although the social scientific research on same-sex marriage is in its infancy, there are a number of reasons to be concerned about the consequences of redefining marriage to include same-sex relationships. First, no one can definitively say at this point how children are affected by being reared by same-sex couples. The current research on children reared by same-sex couples is inconclusive and underdeveloped-we do not yet have any large, long-term, longitudinal studies that can tell us much about how children are affected by being raised in a same-sex household.94
Steven Nock. 2001. Affidavit to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice regarding Halpern et al. v. Canada. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Sociology Department. William Meezan and Jonathan Rauch. 2005. "Gay Marriage, Same-Sex Parenting, and America's Children." Future of Children 15: 97-115.
Yet the larger empirical literature on child well-being suggests that the two sexes bring different talents to the parenting enterprise, and that children benefit from growing up with both their biological parents. This strongly suggests that children reared by same-sex parents will experience greater difficulties with their identity, sexuality, attachments to kin, and marital prospects as adults, among other things. But until more research is available, the jury is still out.
Yet there remain even deeper concerns about the institutional consequences of same-sex marriage for marriage itself. Same-sex marriage would further undercut the idea that procreation is intrinsically connected to marriage. It would undermine the idea that children need both a mother and a father, further weakening the societal norm that men should take responsibility for the children they beget. Finally, same-sex marriage would likely corrode marital norms of sexual fidelity, since gay marriage advocates and gay couples tend to downplay the importance of sexual fidelity in their definition of marriage. Surveys of men entering same-sex civil unions in Vermont indicate that 50 percent of them do not value sexual fidelity, and rates of sexual promiscuity are high among gay men.95
Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solomon. 2003. Civil Unions in the State of Vermont: A Report on the First Year. University of Vermont Department of Psychology. David McWhirter and Andrew Mattison. 1984. The Male Couple. Prentice Hall. Andrew Sullivan. 1995. Virtually Normal. New York: Knopf, first edition.
Personal note: It might be that there is a sex difference and that gay women would be very different than gay men. In which case, a case might be made that recognizing gay marriage for women only might be an easier sale.
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