Such rhetoric is fun but irrelevant.
Words in and of themselves are symbols of ideas. As with all other symbols, they have no inherent meaning. They have only the meaning people assign to them.
The problem is that a very large and rapidly growing percentage of the population assigns a different meaning to the symbol/word “marriage” than the traditional one. It is my expectation, though not my desire, that this group will soon be a majority, and then an increasing majority.
At the root of this issue is that America, as a democratic nation, worships majority opinion, and always has. See Tocqueville.
A very large percentage of those who previously opposed homosexuality and gay marriage did so simply because it was the majority opinion. Now that this has, or shortly will have, flipped, these same people who have no other vasis for their opinions, will flip with it. Greatly accelerating the speed in change of opinion.
Personally, I expect, though do not approve, that in 5 years a considerable majority of states will allow gay marriage. In the next 10 years I expect a Supreme Court ruling making its recognition a constitutional right.
This is at root a cultural issue. In any democratic society the laws merely reflect the culture, generally with a considerable lag time. Changes begin in the culture and move to the legal and political realms. It is, at least to me, obvious that conservatives abandoned the cultural realm at least 50 years ago, mostly in understandable disgust.
But this of course left the field unchallenged to the enemies of our society. We’ve been living on our inherited cultural capital, which was immense, but it’s pretty much used up by this point.
No; they all have meaning beyond what people “assign”. There’s a reason why the Bible says “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21)—civilizations have risen and fallen on mere words.