The Supreme Court could use a mathematician’s touch.

If there is one skill that mathematicians possess, it is the ability to define things properly. (Heck, we even define what it means to be “well-defined.”) This is not just ego; this trait has been pointed out by several non-mathematical friends.

So you can imagine, dear reader, how I twitched and spasmed as I listened to the Supreme Court debate over same-sex marriage last week, a series of so-called logical arguments based on so many ill-defined terms.

Two phrases in particular stood out in the arguments of those in favor of traditional marriage: “family” and “traditional marriage” itself.

Family often gets defined as just the nuclear, white-picket-fence family — that is, parents and their biological children, no one else. And yet, it then gets placed into arguments where a much larger notion of family is required.

Take, for instance, the argument that without a father, a child will grow up without a masculine role model. This discounts the uncles, grandfathers, godfathers, stepfathers, (much) older brothers and cousins within an extended family, not to mention the community leaders, friends of the family, neighbors, teachers and the occasional fictional character who all exist outside the extended family.

In restricting the definition of family so tightly, traditional marriage advocates marginalize many other important family structures, including adoptive parents, foster parents and single parents, such as widows and widowers. My own parents divorced and remarried. This did not leave me with something less than a family; if anything, it left me with twice as much family.

With the term “marriage,” at least, all sides agree on what the word means legally. The problem comes when traditional marriage advocates refer to marriage as it is now as also being the traditional form of marriage.

The last major shift in the definition of marriage happened quite recently in this country, with the Loving v. Virginia decision that declared that marriage did not depend upon the race of those who entered into it. This was not merely a change in the legal definition: It also had a great impact on the social definition of marriage. In the years since the Loving case, we as a society have come to embrace the idea that race has no bearing on marriage.

If we go back further, we see even greater changes. We see marriages of women who were only in their mid-teens. We see the popularity of arranged marriages.

And let us not forget that in many cultures, women were historically considered property owned first by their father and then by their husband. We no longer consider women to be chattel, and as a result the whole notion (and arguably the purpose) of marriage has changed drastically over its history.

Even the idea that, whatever other shifts have occurred, marriage has always been between one man and one woman, is still untrue. A number of cultures across the world have permitted polyamorous unions and same-sex unions.

Things get even messier if we try to accept “biblical marriage” and “one man, one woman” as synonymous. There are multiple types of marriage in the Bible beyond one man and one woman. Many tales in the Old Testament and the Torah include polygamy (Jacob, Abraham, Solomon) with polygamy referring not just to having multiple wives but also to having a wife together with a female slave or concubine. 

Chapter 22 of Deuteronomy says that a man who rapes an unmarried – and unpledged – virgin is forced to pay a fine to her father and marry her. Levirate marriage was a custom of marrying a childless widow to her dead husband’s brother to carry on the family line. In neither of these cases am I aware of any restriction on the number of wives a man may have. If a man already had a wife and his married brother died without descendants, the first man would now have two wives.

The Bible is certainly not a good example of a “one man, one woman” tradition.

If we want to have a civilized debate over marriage equality in our courts and elsewhere, we must start with an understanding of the very words we are debating over. Otherwise, we will do nothing but talk past one another time after time.

Joseph is a graduate student in mathematics. He can be reached at [email protected].