Puns are fine. Painfully bad leaps of logic are not.
Yes, these excuses are spouted out by many, but so what?
The number of people arguing on behalf of the truth is immaterial. The truth is not.
1. Whether it started out as act of disobedience or not is neither here nor there.
If one is a Christian, one believes that all the pain and suffering in the world derives from a single act of disobedience. Loving God and serving him is consequential. It is not "neither here nor there."
Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus was an act of disobedience, and thank God for that.
This is the worst analogy I have seen in a while. If Rosa Parks had pushed the driver out of his seat at gunpoint and tried to drive the bus, you might have had a point. As it stands, you don't.
The origins of the practice have nothing to do with whether it is right or wrong TODAY.
In other words, all morality is purely situational. There is no right or wrong, there is only what is "right or wrong TODAY", as you put it.
This practice does not interfere with recruitment to the priesthood.
It certainly does and the statistics prove it. Wherever the practice is common there are next to no seminarians. Wherever the practice is rare, there are many.
Boys can still be altar boys, and if it influences them to become priests, then great.
At the age of 8-12 most boys would rather die than join a club with girls in it. The feminization of the acolytate is a sure way of discouraging boys from joining.
Whether or not there is a girl standing next to a 10 - 14 year old boy (the age of altar servers) during the mass is not going to affect a young man's decision to enter the priesthood when he is 18 - 20.
It affects his decision to stand at the altar in the first place.
Human nature does not change, no matter how radical feminist church-wreckers wish that it would.