Ugh. You always hear how our educational system is failing, and reading some of these posts illustrates why. Where do I even start?
You would have thought that Justice Scalia's scathing rebuke of his colleagues for their creative rewriting of obamacare.....(when is a state the federal governmnet and the Secretary of Human Services)... would have opened some eyes for the necessity of precision in writing law. Words have meanings, and you just can't rewrite stuff to make it work better(in your opinion). You just can't rewrite definitions of words, or interpretations of words to fit an argument...that's academically dishonest.
Some have argued that word meanings "evolve" over time....that is true...millennia, centuries, multiple scores.....but in ten years?...that's not evolving, that's a
rewrite to fit a political cause.
A basic rule in logic is that you cannot draw generalizations from specifics. You can draw specifics from generalities, but vice versa is a logical fail.
Words and terminiology are no different. Some words are more general terms and some more specific.
A voter in the United States used to mean a white adult male property holder
No....a "voter" means one who votes. "an adult white male property holder" (circa 1800)is a sub set of that term. We can add other subsets at a later date...and we did.
Marriage on the other hand is specific for a man and a woman in that we cannot find any( or if any, very very few) other definitions to the contrary prior to the last decade or two. Any subsets for that word would start with the basic definition of a union between man and a woman...such as arranged marriages, marriages of convienience...etc etc. Adding same sex unions to "marriage" is changing the basic definition of the word, and is taking a specific and making it more general. Should we be in the habit of changing definitions of words for political expediency?
Last but not least, I want to thank
boatshoes for providing the ultimate example of what I'm talking about. We all know the traditional, historical definition of slavery. It's reared it's ugly head in Egypt, Europe and all over the African continent. But here...in his "Civil Bondage Act of 2018" we are talikng about rewriting the definition to satisfy a political group. Fail.
Lastly some have called it petty...if it's so petty then let it go and throw the fundamentalists a bone. It doesn't mean anything, right?