Great list mookiemookie,
Really Skybird, you seem to be a bit obsessed with what looks more and more as a
linguistic last stand of yours. But I think you really described the position you yourself is in, with the example from South Africa.
It is as if you would be saying that "tax reduction" has by its very legal and cultural history a meaning that has nothing to do with Asian people (it could have been like that, with some imagination). If we include these people in the legal reform, tax reduction will mean nothing clear any more. It could mean anything. The whole economic system is in danger if we do this.
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They should have included Asian emmigrants living in south Africa for a given number of years in that law reform, and they would have been done.
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Yes, and homosexual people can be included in a reform of marriage without any terribly mind twisting or muddling of the language, or a somewhat mystic devaluing of it as an institution!
You are well into the metaphysics of marriage the way you argue the other stuff at the moment. I can agree there are things to discuss and consider in connection to this subject, some of which you have brought forward. But when it now comes to all this talk about value, definition and confused meaning, it seems like a very weak line of defence.
Marriage is a term with a history, yes, grown out of and denoting certain practices and rules in organizing and controlling society. That has been a changing history, even in western civilization. So you mean marriage was suddenly an unclear word every time something changed in the practices or rules connected to it? Or is it that now, with homosexual marriage, the essential thing about the concept is challenged, which somehow never happened with the other changes of what marriage can be and can not be? This sounds as when Thomas Hobbes refused to accept the possibility of vacuum on the grounds that it was a contradiction in terms, which would turn natural philosophy into turmoil, as the words would not be part of a proper science any more...
To me, you try to make the term marriage do a lot more work than it can.
It's not a logical concept as you try to have it, therefore nothing bizarre will happen if one extends its meaning to allow for homosexual marriage. Heck, people that don't like that legal definition of marriage in a country (like in Sweden) can still
talk about it in the good old way, but people left out from the real legal, economic and social benefits a marriage given to citizens forming a family can't talk themselves into having these rights by using the words this or that way.
So why can't we just call it "verpartnern" instead? Homosexual verpartnern and heterosexuals marry each other. But that would be like having two concepts for the same thing... Like when gay people own something its called propertyx and heterosexuals have property, but they are still part of the same legal and social system in a society that rules what you can do and not do with things you own.
Ok, I'm taking a break from all these analogies. Going for the Sunday long running session. Take care everyone.
Cheers porphy