Marriage always has been and always will be a covenant between a man and a woman. The core meaning is a part of human nature. We can’t change the meaning of marriage because we can’t change human nature. Most of us anyway have an innate desire to unite with a person of the opposite sex and form a life long relationship. The whole relationship type is stamped with in our very being and is evident by our different yet compatible bodies.

I’m sure there are actually some good arguments out there as to how things do change, (and I’ve had some brilliant conversations with people on both sides of the fence as to either position) but the area that you are treading in is not a valuable argument, at least for the time being.

Try harder, in all sincerity. Why would changing a definition from “man and woman” to “two consenting adults” change all the benefits I listed above?

No, I’m talking about the core definition — the part where if you change it, voting will cease to be voting and become something else. When you strip away all the limitations based on age, gender, land-holding, etc., there is a core definition that remains voting. But if you try to strip the “limitations” of gender from a relationship, what do you get? Nothing. Because the relationship is BASED on who can enter into the relationship. If marriage is the “husband-wife relationship”, and you try to strip away the husband-wife relationship, what is left? Absolutely nothing. “Any two consenting adults entering into a contract” is a far cry from the husband-wife relationship.

And yet, with all of that, allowing women to vote did not change the underlying definition of voting. But allowing homosexual marriage changes the underlying definition of marriage as the “husband-wife relationship”. Relationships are a completely different ballpark, because at the core of the definition is the people allowed to enter into it. And in close family relationships, gender is an essential part of those definitions. Father-son relationship is not the same as mother-son because of gender.

Originally, the right to vote was allowed to women in Utah, because they felt that the women would vote against polygamy, however, when the women actually did vote, and for polygamy, they were again disenfranchised (via the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887).

Though, if we want to look at other “significant” changes that happened with Utah, Prohibition, the only Constitutional amendment that stopped someone from doing something (Via the 18th Amendment), was repealed with the last vote repealing it coming from voters in Utah, even though some LDS Church leaders were against the ratification of the 21st amendment, specifically Heber J. Grant, then president and prophet of the LDS church.