Marriage redefined to the new realities

IN his letter headlined ‘Partners bill fraught with anomalies’ (March 22), Noel O’Shaughnessy refers to the Oxford Dictionary of English and the “natural law” of Christian belief to support his definition of the family unit as being a male and female and their children.

This is not the first time opponents of gay equality have relied on either the “defined word” or the “divine word” to justify their prejudice.

It may come as a surprise to Mr Shaughnessy, but dictionaries all over the English-speaking world seem to disagree with his definition. In 2003, Webster’s included in its definition of marriage “the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage”.