The "defense of marriage" position

[SteveII]

You need to give examples of societies where 99.999% of what people considered marriage is not between a man and women with the intention for life.

Mine. Marriage doesn't require the production of offspring nor does it contain the mention of children or of producing children at all; traditional marriage vows do not contain any mention of having children and raising them together. Marriage between two men and two women is also viewed as perfectly normal. Marriage is mostly viewed as a big party to celebrate two person loving each other and signaling their intent for it to last.

I should not have used the word 'intention'. It is more nuanced than that (like most things). I should have said "between a man and women as the proper framework to bring about life". Historically the concept of family formation (attained or not) is part of the meaning of marriage.

Your marriage is dependent on the broader concept of marriage. It is a subset. It is not different in kind, it is different through subtraction of family formation--either intentionally or unintentionally or from time passing on: I am in the empty nest stage. When my kids left, no one would say I ceased to be married. That's why this point is not a defeater for the same-sex opposition argument.

Marriage (traditionally conceived) is older than recorded history and is the basis institutional building block for all known societies right up until today.

This is, again, a false equivocation between marriage (the institution we have and as defined by our culture and modern religious practices and rituals) and coupling between men and women to form family groups recognized by past society. Marriages, if defined as an institution, relies on the idea of a legal definition, of a government, of specific rituals and rules. It's not the same thing as marriage, as defined as a custom or to describe a couple. It would be making both presentism and ethnocentric biases to assume the two are the same.

Oxford Dictionary (second definition):

2. an established law, practice, or custom.
"the institution of marriage"

Since the concept of marriage predates the concept of government, it obviously does not rely on it. At it's core, it is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts. It does not require a law or even a ritual to come into being. It still doesn't.

Here is an example of traditional marriage that you would certainly not consider a marriage: Bridenapping. This is very traditional and common to almost all societies in human history, but I don't think the practice of stealing women from your enemies to rape them and marry them by force is considered "traditional" by you despite being literally and tradition. In fact, I would believe these unions should not be called marriages even though they were. Today, we would refer to such "unions" as slavery more than marriages.

You are using slavery as your only rebuttal to the idea that the concept of marriage has been singular and stable for many millennium? As I said just above: at it's core, marriage is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts.

[SteveII]

My point was the family is the best vehicle for transmitting values, morality, and ethics. Other institutions can but are way less effective and if we had to reply on them, we would be in trouble. What would be more effective to produce a balanced young adult prepared to navigate a pluralistic society: parents living out (modeling) tolerance to their children as they grow up for 18 years or taking periodic trips to see other cultures? Exposure to different cultures does not create tolerance, it creates knowledge that may or may not lead to tolerance.

Same with schools, churches, community groups. They may teach values and may fill in where parents fall short, but the family has way more potential for modeling lasting values. Why?

Firstly, because values are really low-level worldview concepts. A worldview is a comprehensive perspective through which one interprets and understands the world around them. It's a mental model of reality, encompassing beliefs about the nature of the universe, life, morality, humanity, and other fundamental aspects. Nestled within a larger worldview, values cannot be easily created nor changed. Formation or change in values would take time as there would certainly have to be worldview shifts to incorporate the change in the wider structure. Institutions may influence, but the family remains the best method.

Secondly, the best way to inculcate values is modeling them. The family is the best way to model a value because a) it takes time and repetition to model something so that the next generation accepts it, and b) successful modeling requires meaningful context and family life context is second to none in influence. Watching a documentary in school on the importance of soup kitchens is nowhere nearly as effective as serving in one periodically with your parents.

But there is also the model of 2 angry parents who stop getting along as well as they once did and the child who suffers the confusion of their anger.  Automatically connecting "2 parents to childhood happiness" can be inaccurate sometimes.  Law and religion sometimes pushes unhappy parents to stay together.  I don't think that is always good for the children.  

There is no guaranteed 2 or 1 combination of adults (and there are many) that are best for children.  It depends on the individual adults.

We are talking about the concept of marriage as a basis for family formation. Necessarily, discussing the concept of marriage assumes a functional one. One of my points early on is the problem that more and more adults can't manage that. That is not a problem with the concept of marriage, that is a problem with adults today.

There is one "best" for children: married, biological parents in a loving and functional home. Your point is what's best given that adults can't control themselves or commit to hard work. You're right, sometime "best" for the child is taken off the table and they get something less. But ideally, we need to educate, promote, foster and reward the actual best scenario.

[no one]

As long as the two people involved love each other, whether they be a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, "marriage" is irrelevant. It is just a piece of paper, that makes it that much harder to separate when change occurs.

But mindless, blowhards, such as little stevieboi, get off on control. They cannot imagine outside of their sad, pathetic, little box.

[SteveII]

I notice he hasn’t mentioned marriage to multiple wives and it being biblical.
How about a society where a woman must first be pregnant before a marriage can take place?  That is a case of marriage designed to include children.

Many warrior groups were (most likely gay) men bonded to each other for life…though not called marriage?

Royalty had arranged marriages solely to produce heirs and the woman was blamed when no children were produced.  The royal male was permitted concubines in many of them.

Humans are as creative as always in deciding what constitutes a marriage or union.  Shall we look at child brides?  Thats usually a man and a girl though I wouldn’t call her a woman.

That's a bit the point of the rhetorical trick. It's a classic Motte and Bailey argument. Someone attacks the tradition and centrality of marriage in human society? Equivocate between marriage and people forming couples to start and produce a family: the Motte. Someone talks about divorce, polygamy, bridenapping, sexual slavery, marriages of convenience, homosexual marriages, by-law couples and families, recomposed family, etc. Then suddenly marriages means the sacrament as used by a specific religion or sect: the Bailey. Someone attacks that more narrowly defined tradition: retreat to the Motte and then start all over again.

Good thing I have argued for marriage on the grounds of all cultures, all times, natural law, psychology, and outcomes.

[Cavebear]

But there is also the model of 2 angry parents who stop getting along as well as they once did and the child who suffers the confusion of their anger.  Automatically connecting "2 parents to childhood happiness" can be inaccurate sometimes.  Law and religion sometimes pushes unhappy parents to stay together.  I don't think that is always good for the children.  

There is no guaranteed 2 or 1 combination of adults (and there are many) that are best for children.  It depends on the individual adults.

We are talking about the concept of marriage as a basis for family formation. Necessarily, discussing the concept of marriage assumes a functional one. One of my points early on is the problem that more and more adults can't manage that. That is not a problem with the concept of marriage, that is a problem with adults today.

There is one "best" for children: married, biological parents in a loving and functional home. Your point is what's best given that adults can't control themselves or commit to hard work. You're right, sometime "best" for the child is taken off the table and they get something less. But ideally, we need to educate, promote, foster and reward the actual best scenario.

You said "Necessarily, discussing the concept of marriage assumes a functional one". You can't extend that assumption to reality. Ideally, any combination of parents would work well for children would work well as long as they get good role models. I grew up in a very standard Mom/Dad world where both parents loved each other. But that doest mean that a single parent or even 3 can't work for the kids.

What about divorces". According to Forbes...

How Many Marriages End in Divorce?

So, what about the famous statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce? That’s true, but only when it comes to first marriages, half of which are dissolved. Second and third marriages actually fail at a far higher rate.

When Do Couples Divorce?

When marriages end, usually some time has passed since the wedding. In fact, the average length of a marriage prior to divorce is eight years. Only 8 years. Kids come just before divorce. Yet they grow up well. Or maybe not. What to you think about that? Just asking...

[epronovost]

What would be more effective to produce a balanced young adult prepared to navigate a pluralistic society: parents living out (modeling) tolerance to their children as they grow up for 18 years or taking periodic trips to see other cultures?

How can parents model tolerance without being exposed themselves to other cultures; without them actually interacting in a positive manner with members of other cultures? The model becomes purely theoretical and of low quality; that's like trying to learn how to fight without ever doing sparring. Plus, your entire arguments forgets that teachers do modeling too.. all the time. An educational trip is not just a trip. It's a trip that contains education and modelling. You forget that, even stronger than modelling, a child can interact positively with members of groups very different than their own. It's a bit of a shortcut, but if your child becomes friends with a transboy for example, his chances of ever learning to hate transgender individuals is severely reduced. Sure, your child could compartmentalized and treat his friend as "one of the good ones", but this might be fairly difficult especially if the transboy in question express solidarity towards other members of his class and identity group. The best and easiest way for people to refuse to accept negative stereotypes about certain people is to introduce them to people who do not meet those stereotypes or even better, seem to correspond to the stereotype at first glance, but don't.

Secondly, the best way to inculcate values is modeling them. The family is the best way to model a value because a) it takes time and repetition to model something so that the next generation accepts it, and b) successful modeling requires meaningful context and family life context is second to none in influence. Watching a documentary in school on the importance of soup kitchens is nowhere nearly as effective as serving in one periodically with your parents.

A child spends about as much time at school than with their parents. A primary school teacher might spend more time than some parents (if they work long hours for example) with a child and scarcely less than a normal parents. Modelling also requires skills. You can model very poorly things. It also requires useful context too. Modeling tolerance for poor black people for example is pretty hard when there is no such poor black people around in your life. The same goes for transgender individuals, homosexuals, illegal immigrants, former prisoners, etc. That's also why television and cinema is such a useful modelling tool. Most people understanding and views on the police, war, the military or some historical era comes from TV and movies.

I don't disagree with you with the importance of family in inculcating values, but it seems to me you are exaggerating it's importance and qualities. If the family was such a better equipped and more effective institution to teach children and teens values and worldviews, there would not be that much worry and debates on how and what values schools and friend groups teach children and teens. School and friend groups transform children and teens sometime in radical and profound ways. This shows the power and importance of these institutions and social groups in the formation of a healthy adult.

[epronovost]

2. an established law, practice, or custom.
"the institution of marriage"

Since the concept of marriage predates the concept of government, it obviously does not rely on it. At it's core, it is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts. It does not require a law or even a ritual to come into being. It still doesn't.

Then what's the difference between marriage and forming a couple? According to your definition my older brother, who is not married, is married because he is in a romantic relationship with the same woman for about a decade and has children with her. You arrive at something that doesn't make sense.

According to your definition, it seems that two teenage girls exchanging their first kiss around Christmas time and forming a couple are thus married. It's a personal agreement, a commitment to a natural law concept called love. They promised each other mutual affection, trust, loyalty, potentially forever and might one day have children together, but are a bit too young and too early in the relationship to do it. Are they married? They seem to fit your definition.

? As I said just above: at it's core, marriage is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts.

That's what we normies call a couple. A couple is two people forming a union based on trust with a set of implicit and explicit rules. How is a couple different than a marriage?

[Kathryn L]

Hi Steve,

Thank you for the welcome.  I will respond to a few of your points.  I have no intention of getting into a full-blown quote-quoting argument with you, but I will give you my two cents and leave it be.

Yes, divorce was never God's intention for marriage, but neither was unloving marriage or what people call toxic marriages. Even Moses, from way back then, could see situations of keeping people together that were more harmful than good.  This is why Jesus said, "because your hearts (human hearts) were hardened."  There were marriages that Moses was witnessing where people had developed hatred toward one another, and it was more beneficial to create divorce than to force some people to stay together.  I would like to remind you, that Moses, the permitter of divorce, shows up in the New Testament and ministers to Jesus.   Moses, the one who permitted divorce, was also called God's friend.  It means someone who actually understood who He was and walked closely with God.  That is because he, Moses, understood God's ultimate "rule" or "law" of love being the "rule" over everything (i.e. "Love covers a multitude of sins" and "Love is the fulfillment of the law").  

I would also like to say that many of the people who came to Jesus or who Jesus came to were prostitutes, adulterers, divorced women, and people who were unclean by God's law, yet Jesus accepted them into His Kingdom over the Pharisees and people who were doing everything right.  I'm sure the Pharisees had marriages that looked good on the outside (white, straight, heterosexual), and yet, Jesus did not think very highly of them.  He viewed them as looking good on the outside (whitewashed tombs) and dead on the inside.

You can have two straight people together in an unloving and emotionally abusive marriage and two gay people together who treat each other with more love, kindness, and honesty toward each other.  I wonder which one you think God prefers?

If you look at the Luther Bible, there is no mention of the topic of being gay or the word "homosexual."  That's because the word homosexual wasn't invented until 1868.  So, when you see the word "homosexual" written in any bible today, it's a relatively modern translation that many Christians take as a true or at face value.  What I often notice amongst conservative Christians is they have a mentality that you can't question scripture because it's "God's authoritative word", yet you can because God gave you a brain and that's how translations come about.  What Luther writes is, "You shall not lie with a boy as with a woman" or "If anyone sleeps with a boy as with a woman, they have committed an abomination."  That's a pretty big difference from other newer translations which say "man."  So, it would seem God cares more about children being molested and sexually abused by older men than someone being gay.

I'm also not saying that marriage isn't valuable to society, or that any more liberally-minded person on the subject is, but what they are saying is that, just because someone is married, doesn't make it good, and just because people are divorced, doesn't make it bad.  It simply is.  They also tend to believe that gay people being married isn't some inherent threat to society.  Heterosexual people are just as able to marry and have loving marriages as they always were.  Divorce, that came from Moses, never changed this.

That's because marriage isn't the foundation of society, it's love. Love is the fulfillment of the law, as Jesus said, and when people can learn how to love one another, then you can have a healthy, functioning society.

"Love one another."  "As I have loved you so you must love one another."

[SteveII]

2. an established law, practice, or custom.
"the institution of marriage"

Since the concept of marriage predates the concept of government, it obviously does not rely on it. At it's core, it is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts. It does not require a law or even a ritual to come into being. It still doesn't.

Then what's the difference between marriage and forming a couple? According to your definition my older brother, who is not married, is married because he is in a romantic relationship with the same woman for about a decade and has children with her. You arrive at something that doesn't make sense.

According to your definition, it seems that two teenage girls exchanging their first kiss around Christmas time and forming a couple are thus married. It's a personal agreement, a commitment to a natural law concept called love. They promised each other mutual affection, trust, loyalty, potentially forever and might one day have children together, but are a bit too young and too early in the relationship to do it. Are they married? They seem to fit your definition.  

? As I said just above: at it's core, marriage is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts.

That's what we normies call a couple. A couple is two people forming a union based on trust with a set of implicit and explicit rules. How is a couple different than a marriage?

All marriages are couples. All couples are not marriages. The difference is obviously the formality of the commitment, the responsibilities one agrees to and the recognition (and to some extent, enforcement) by society.

[epronovost]

Then what's the difference between marriage and forming a couple? According to your definition my older brother, who is not married, is married because he is in a romantic relationship with the same woman for about a decade and has children with her. You arrive at something that doesn't make sense.

According to your definition, it seems that two teenage girls exchanging their first kiss around Christmas time and forming a couple are thus married. It's a personal agreement, a commitment to a natural law concept called love. They promised each other mutual affection, trust, loyalty, potentially forever and might one day have children together, but are a bit too young and too early in the relationship to do it. Are they married? They seem to fit your definition.  


That's what we normies call a couple. A couple is two people forming a union based on trust with a set of implicit and explicit rules. How is a couple different than a marriage?

All marriages are couples. All couples are not marriages. The difference is obviously the formality of the commitment, the responsibilities one agrees to and the recognition (and to some extent, enforcement) by society.

Then, according to your own definition and views on marriage, is my older brother married or not? What about the two teenage girls in my example (if you need to know let's say they are 18 years old).

[1Sam15]

Then what's the difference between marriage and forming a couple? According to your definition my older brother, who is not married, is married because he is in a romantic relationship with the same woman for about a decade and has children with her. You arrive at something that doesn't make sense.

According to your definition, it seems that two teenage girls exchanging their first kiss around Christmas time and forming a couple are thus married. It's a personal agreement, a commitment to a natural law concept called love. They promised each other mutual affection, trust, loyalty, potentially forever and might one day have children together, but are a bit too young and too early in the relationship to do it. Are they married? They seem to fit your definition.  


That's what we normies call a couple. A couple is two people forming a union based on trust with a set of implicit and explicit rules. How is a couple different than a marriage?

All marriages are couples. All couples are not marriages. The difference is obviously the formality of the commitment, the responsibilities one agrees to and the recognition (and to some extent, enforcement) by society.

So Adam and Eve would have been married?

But all the sons that fucked Eve aren’t married to Eve? They’re just couples?

Same with Adam fucking all his daughters? Just couples?


How does it work with the sons fucking their sisters?

[SteveII]

Hi Steve,

Thank you for the welcome.  I will respond to a few of your points.  I have no intention of getting into a full-blown quote-quoting argument with you, but I will give you my two cents and leave it be.

Yes, divorce was never God's intention for marriage, but neither was unloving marriage or what people call toxic marriages. Even Moses, from way back then, could see situations of keeping people together that were more harmful than good.  This is why Jesus said, "because your hearts (human hearts) were hardened."  There were marriages that Moses was witnessing where people had developed hatred toward one another, and it was more beneficial to create divorce than to force some people to stay together.  I would like to remind you, that Moses, the permitter of divorce, shows up in the New Testament and ministers to Jesus.   Moses, the one who permitted divorce, was also called God's friend.  It means someone who actually understood who He was and walked closely with God.  That is because he, Moses, understood God's ultimate "rule" or "law" of love being the "rule" over everything (i.e. "Love covers a multitude of sins" and "Love is the fulfillment of the law").  

You make a lot of assumptions about the reason divorce was permitted in the Mosaic Law. It almost definitely had nothing to do with falling out of love (marriages were arranged). It probably had more to do with giving women a safety net. Divorce laws in Deuteronomy were seen as a way to protect women in a patriarchal society. Without legal divorce, a woman could be abandoned without any rights or support. By regulating divorce, these laws ensured that a woman had certain rights and protections, such as the freedom to remarry.

I would also like to say that many of the people who came to Jesus or who Jesus came to were prostitutes, adulterers, divorced women, and people who were unclean by God's law, yet Jesus accepted them into His Kingdom over the Pharisees and people who were doing everything right.  I'm sure the Pharisees had marriages that looked good on the outside (white, straight, heterosexual), and yet, Jesus did not think very highly of them.  He viewed them as looking good on the outside (whitewashed tombs) and dead on the inside.

You can have two straight people together in an unloving and emotionally abusive marriage and two gay people together who treat each other with more love, kindness, and honesty toward each other.  I wonder which one you think God prefers?

Interesting. In Christianity, one's status before God is a binary, not a continuum. If you are not right before God (accepted salvation, working toward a deeper relationship with him, and striving to live a Christian life) it does not matter what else you are doing. He does not 'prefer' one unrepentant sinner over another.

If you look at the Luther Bible, there is no mention of the topic of being gay or the word "homosexual."  That's because the word homosexual wasn't invented until 1868.  So, when you see the word "homosexual" written in any bible today, it's a relatively modern translation that many Christians take as a true or at face value.  What I often notice amongst conservative Christians is they have a mentality that you can't question scripture because it's "God's authoritative word", yet you can because God gave you a brain and that's how translations come about.  What Luther writes is, "You shall not lie with a boy as with a woman" or "If anyone sleeps with a boy as with a woman, they have committed an abomination."  That's a pretty big difference from other newer translations which say "man."  So, it would seem God cares more about children being molested and sexually abused by older men than someone being gay.

In Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, the Hebrew word used for 'male' is "זָכָר" (pronounced "zakar"). This word is typically translated as "male" in English. In the context of these verses, "zakar" refers specifically to the male gender, typically in contrast to "נְקֵבָה" (pronounced "neqevah"), which means female. The use of "zakar" in these verses is straightforward, denoting the male sex in a biological sense. This word is used consistently in the Hebrew Bible to refer to males, both in humans and in animals, and it appears in a variety of contexts, ranging from genealogical listings to legal codes.

The translation of the Hebrew word "זָכָר" (zakar) as "boy" in the context of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 is not a typical or mainstream translation in biblical scholarship. The word "zakar" is most accurately and commonly translated as "male," referring to the male gender in a broad and general sense, applicable to males of any age, from boys to adult men. So, the basis for translating "zakar" as "boy" in these specific Levitical passages is not rooted in traditional linguistic or scholarly interpretation, but rather it arises from a particular interpretive agenda. In Hebrew, the word for "boy" is usually "ילד" (yeled) or "נער" (na'ar), which are distinct from "זָכָר" (zakar).

But that is really irrelevant. The Bible, in multiple places (especially the NT), condemns sexual immorality--including gay sex in lists of other sins, including sexual sins. One's orientation (desires) is never mention--so you are beating up a straw man. (see Romans 1:26-27; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:9-10)

I'm also not saying that marriage isn't valuable to society, or that any more liberally-minded person on the subject is, but what they are saying is that, just because someone is married, doesn't make it good, and just because people are divorced, doesn't make it bad.  It simply is.  They also tend to believe that gay people being married isn't some inherent threat to society.  Heterosexual people are just as able to marry and have loving marriages as they always were.  Divorce, that came from Moses, never changed this.

That's because marriage isn't the foundation of society, it's love. Love is the fulfillment of the law, as Jesus said, and when people can learn how to love one another, then you can have a healthy, functioning society.

"Love one another."  "As I have loved you so you must love one another."

I am arguing the position that marriage is not taken serious enough in today's society (at least many western societies) and there are ramifications everywhere you look. Gay marriage is not the threat, it is the result of not understanding marriage's proper and important place in society. If you reduce marriage from a high-institutional view down to any loving relationship can be defined as one, we have lost something important and detrimental to long-term societal health.

Marriage most certainly is the foundation of all societies, worldwide--since before recorded history. To say otherwise is just proof you have bought into the cheap version. Using Jesus' emphasis on loving one another as some sort of replacement for marriage is to misapply the doctrine and misunderstand the institution of marriage.

[SteveII]

Sorry, I thought I had posted this, it was saved in my drafts...

2. an established law, practice, or custom.
"the institution of marriage"

Since the concept of marriage predates the concept of government, it obviously does not rely on it. At it's core, it is a personal agreement, a contract, a commitment--natural law concepts. It does not require a law or even a ritual to come into being. It still doesn't.

Then what's the difference between marriage and forming a couple? According to your definition my older brother, who is not married, is married because he is in a romantic relationship with the same woman for about a decade and has children with her. You arrive at something that doesn't make sense.

Two teenage girls exchanging their first kiss around Christmas time and forming a couple married. It's a personal agreement, a commitment to a natural law concept called love. They promised each other mutual affection, trust, loyalty, potentially forever and might one day have children together, but are a bit too young and too early in the relationship to do it. Are they married? They seem to fit your definition.  

Interesting questions.  

My answer was in response to marriage requiring a government to bring it into being and I did not anticipate the needed nuance. It is not a private affair. It is an institution recognized by and has meaning in the wider community. Depending on the culture, you assent to certain obligations, your relationship to the community changes. It has to be formalize in some way. I just meant it didn't have to be formalized in a specific way.

In the first case with your brother you can't stumble into marriage unintentionally. In the second case with the teenage girls it seems you are describing all serious dating relationships and nothing more. But the two-girl thing probably was not an accident in your example. If you think two girls can get married, it fundamentally changes the concept of marriage. It is not widening the definition, it is stripping the historic definition of a fundamental feature.

So before this generation and for all recorded history, at the very least, the definition of marriage was a public commitment of a man and women to a lifetime union for which that union would also serve as the proper framework to bring about life.

[epronovost]

It has to be formalize in some way. I just meant it didn't have to be formalized in a specific way.

Here's my problem. Once a relationship is established publicly is it a marriage? If I am introduced to a friend's spouse, even if I know they do not have notarized marriage act (the government stuff), I know their relationship exist and is important. I would not, for example, flirt with their spouse even if I found them extraordinarily attractive. If they were introduced as friends instead of spouse, I probably would have. Are these people married?

In the first case with your brother you can't stumble into marriage unintentionally.

That would be historically inaccurate though. Many a marriage was formed when two people had sex and the woman fell pregnant thus requiring an emergency marriage to save face even if it was not the intention or desire of those people. We also used to have this practice of marrying virgin rape victims to their rapists and forced marriages were also all too common. Historically there are many ways in which a person could find themselves in marriage unintentionally following some problem.

In the second case with the teenage girls it seems you are describing all serious dating relationships and nothing more.

 

I agree with you, but where do you draw the line between marriage and "serious dating relationships" both are matter of public affair and recognized by society and culture in general.

But the two-girl thing probably was not an accident in your example. If you think two girls can get married, it fundamentally changes the concept of marriage. It is not widening the definition, it is stripping the historic definition of a fundamental feature.

As would dropping forced marriages and marriages of convenience. These were not uncommon forms of marriage in history. Polygamy was also fairly common as a form of marriages, but illegal in all Western Countries since the Roman Empire.

I Would also note that change to an institution is not necessarily negative. Prohibitions on child marriages for example would be stripping a historic and fundamental feature of marriage, but I think that this stripping away this feature does not threaten or "cheapen" marriage as an institution. Institutions are built to change or they die.

So before this generation and for all recorded history, at the very least, the definition of marriage was a public commitment of a man and women to a lifetime union for which that union would also serve as the proper framework to bring about life.

By this definition, my brother, who is not legally married, would count as married and the lesbian couple would not specifically and ONLY because they are two women. Had they been a man and a woman they would have been married the moment they started dating seriously with one another and announced their relationship to friends and family.

I would also like to note that if marriage pre-dates governments, so does homosexuality. Homosexual couples certainly existed during human prehistory thus it's uncertain to declare that the definition of marriage should not include them too. What if it's the work of governments to withdraw them from the definition in ancient times?