A Salute to the Good Word

Oh, what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet... and luckily for us there's no shortage of bullshit around to serve as fertilizer...

Argument: The Government has no right to change the definition of Marriage!
Well, actually, funny you should mention that...

"The state - which did not invent marriage - has no authority to reinvent it." -Bob McCoskrie

It is entirely within the purview of government to determine what legal rights and statuses should exist, and to which people these rights and status should extend. Depending on what you consider 'the state' (whether it is the formal legal entity, such as that established by democratic principle, or rather the collective communal will of a populace conscious of the concept of 'a state', such as the Greek polis from which the term 'politics' is derived, or whether it is merely the communal organisation of a society, whatever its governing structure, for instance tribal council), the idea of the legal status of marriage certainly did not occur before there was a state to confer said legal status. And as the bill seeks only to address the legal status, and not to speak on or alter existing marriage customs (of which there are many), then it is absolutely the right of the government to be more inclusive, and include homosexual unions under the aegis of the legal state of marriage.

There's another error of reasoning here. The government isn't arbitrarily changing a definition; it is legally recognising and sanctioning a definition that is in use. LGBTQetc. advocates have been agitating for a seat at the table for yonks now, as they say, and our politicians are responding to that. There are plenty of homosexuals who see themselves as married as it is, and want the government to recognise the validy of their relationships. And in some cases, they want the government to recognise their church's desire to solemnify their marriage, which currently they cannot, legally. A Topp Twin 'married' her partner, the papers and magazines reported it as such, their friends and family consider it such, and I do not doubt that Lynda and her lovely partner would like it if the government recognised it as such also. A lot of people already include same-sex partnerships in their concept of 'marriage', including a number of Western nations. 

You see, language is a living thing. Definitions don't simply change, they grow. They grow with new parameters for the definition, to cover new contexts, and the addition of new definitions does not replace or remove existing definitions. Open a dictionary, you'll find that words have plenty of definitions, each representing a slight nuance of meaning or applying to a slightly different context. As Bob fails to notice when he references both Polygamy AND Polyamory, the former word means multiple marriages, and the latter means the same relationship sans marriage. Polygamy is already included in the broad definition of marriage, as is monogamy, meaning marriage restricted to two people. The definitions are already there, independent of legal recognition.

Words are under no threat from this bill. Only two things can remove definitions from common use: lack of use, and authoritative suppression. And there's only one group in this debate trying to remove or restrict definitions, and it sure as heck ain't the ones arguing for an inclusive society (i.e. the ones who support extending legal recognition to minorities). The law and common usage CAN accommodate all. It's worth noting that there are a number of people making specious arguments about 'equality' and semantic differences, trying to paint LGBTQ advocacy as incoherent or hypocritical, by means of restricting meanings so as to render them meaningless, in much the same way as Orwell's 1984 shows the deleterious effect of a shrinking, restrictively definitive language.

Everyone's favourite definition: LITERAL

The government can only control LEGAL DEFINITIONS, which are entirely its right to determine. The government is incapable of controlling language, as language is a living beast that grows through usage, it means what we collectively say it means, its' use is determined in how it is used, and Bob McCoskrie can no more hold back the common usage to which words are put than the government can, no matter how much of a Cnut he is.