Catching up on the week's recorded shows, I was somewhat irritated by The Daily Show's interview with Mike Huckabee once the topic turned to gay marriage.

First, he stood behind the commonly repeated assertion that marriage is about producing the next generation - but if he truly believed this, he wouldn't just oppose gay marriage; he'd want to forbid marriage of people who are sterile or barren, past childbearing years, or who have had permanent birth control procedures. Or who simply don't intend to ever have children; which is why I personally find the "marriage is for procreation" argument particularly despicable: because when the anti-gay-marriage crowd plays that card, what they're saying is that Karen and I don't deserve to be married either.

But I'm used to that one. What I found particularly reprehensible about Huckabee's argument is his repeated complaint that gays were "trying to redefine marriage".

Pardon me, but so what? There's no American equivalent of the Académie française, staunchly protecting the language from any alteration from within or without. Words change in meaning all the time and our civilization has not yet crumbled as a result.

Marriage has been redefined many times before. As Jon Stewart pointed out, in the Old Testament, polygamy was not uncommon, even amongst those purportedly favored by God (David, Solomon, et alia). Marriages have been (and in some places, still are) familial arrangements imposed upon the participants without regard to whether they love (or have even met) one another. And in some places (e.g. Nazi Germany, South Africa, and close to 75% of the United States of America) marriage was redefined to only be valid between two people of the same race. Had marriage not been re-redefined in the United States to permit miscegenation, our next President might never have been born.

But more importantly, that particular argument reveals the truly monstrous nature of those who espouse it. How utterly without empathy - how devoid of anything resembling a conscience - how evil must one be in order to proclaim that the definition of a word is of greater importance than the civil rights of other human beings?