Have you ever heard anyone ever give a single 'coherent' reason to be against marriage equality?

[malthaussen]

51. Ah, interesting. Dr Boswell would appear to have lucked into a good lode

of material. This goes beyond my field of (quasi) expertise. I only know Boswell through The Kindness of Strangers, and that is but a nodding acquaintance. Doing a brief Internet search, though, I see that this is still an interpretive question, and that dissenters challenge his definition of adelphoiesis as equivalent to marriage. He may have been reaching, certainly he had a stake in the question.

There is some scattered evidence of other same-sex marriages from time to time, as recently as the 17th century, which would cause one to wonder, if there were some sort of systematic suppression of these rites in the modern Church and in history, what triggered it.

The "third gender" article is interesting, much new material to me. What is particularly forceful about it is that the evidence is derived from many different cultures, demonstrating the universality of the behaviors. It does drift off a little from the subject of marriage equality, of course, since there is a great difference between acknowledging the existence of a behavior and sanctioning it.

The linguistic difficulty doesn't go away, though. "Matrimony," after all, presumes the presence of a mater.

-- Mal