Quote Originally Posted by Rhyfelwyr View Post
It also happens to be how it is defined in just about every major religion, and every society that has the concept of marriage (so that's pretty much every society).

As a Lutheran country I presume Norway did not traditionally allow same-sex marriages. And I doubt they were allowed when Norway was Catholic for the whole medieval period, or in the Viking-era before that (although I'm not sure on the last one).

So if you want to accept same-sex "marriages" then you are really making up your own concept, its nothing to do with marriage. You can never change what marriage has always been for the past thousands of years.
So what? Atheists get married everyday. Wiccans get married everyday. Agnostics and cross-faith couples get married everyday, even when their union would have been forbidden by the orthodoxy of their faiths for centuries or even milennia of human history.

This strikes me as very similar to the religious argument that the only acceptable purpose of sex or marriage is procreation. Yet there are no attempts to ban barren or infertile couples, or couples who choose never to have children or can't afford to, from marrying, or having sex. Nor should there be.