Imagine, if you will, a very large island (or a small continent if you prefer). On this island there are horses, but for various evolutionary reasons they are all brown. Every last one of them. Also on the island are people, who develop completely isolated from the rest of the world. They develop language, writing, and eventually create dictionaries, all without interacting with any other civilizations. Not unsurprisingly, their dictionary defines their word for horse basically as a large, brown, four-legged, hoofed animal.
One day, a boat arrives with people from another island/continent. Cultural exchanges of various kinds ensue, and eventually one of our island-folk visit the other island. Shortly after arriving, he sees someone riding a black horse. "What's that animal?" he asks his guide. "Why, it's a horse," she replies, confused. "I've seen many people riding them on your island." "Ridiculous," replies the man from our island, "horses are brown!" "But surely," says his guide, "you can see that it is in every practical way identical to the horses on your island, except that it happens to be brown." "Perhaps," says our islander, "but it's clearly not a horse. As you can see, it says right here in this dictionary that horses are brown, so that creature must be some entirely different animal."
At this point, it should be apparent that our islander is rather foolish. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine how this story applies to people who try to base their primary argument against gay marriage on the fact that marriage is defined to be between a man and a woman.
(For those of you already compiling a list of reasons why this is a terrible analogy, I invite you to consider the definition of "person" at the drafting of the US Constitution, and what bearing that has on the validity of the civil rights movement.)
Category: Society
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