In response to:
David, I sincerely doubt the existence of same-sex marriages in medieval Europe. I'm pretty sure the RCC would've clamped down on that one. None of the examples you cited contradicted the logical correlation of a male husband and a female wife, or my statement that no culture has ever accepted same-sex marriages. Many cultures have accepted same-sex sexual partnerships, but not marriages. Polygamy maintains that correlation: if a man is a husband, he has a wife. That he has more than one wife is incidental to the correlation. If the culture (for some reason) allows people to marry dead women, and his wife is dead, she's still a she, at least in some sense.
We know the story well: Barack Obama was for same-sex “marriage” (1996) before he was against it (2004) before he was for it (2012), although in 2008, he was apparently for it and against it (although mainly against it). Based, however, on his strong support for gay activism during his “against” years, it seems clear that he was equivocating in his public opposition to same-sex “marriage.”
But let’s say his views really were evolving, as he claims. Either way, whether equivocating or evolving, he has proven himself to be untrustworthy in this very important matter.
Let’s first consider what appears...
The point of the history lesson is that it's just not true to say that marriage has been unchanged for thousands of years.
Historian Allan Tulchin researched a same-sex union called an "affrèrement” in medieval France -- a legal contract that created a union between two men. Homosexual “marriages” also took place in Ireland in the late 12th to early 13th centuries.
He found drawings depicting a union of Byzantine Emperor Basil I (867-886) and his male companion. This founder of the Macedonian dynasty was actually married to two men, and both weddings took place in churches with priests presiding. His second marriage came about because a woman offered him a dowry if he would marry her son.