Rush Limbaugh explains why he says we’ve lost on the issue of gay marriage:

During the break, I had an e-mail. “Rush, in all of this talk about gay marriage, I haven’t heard what you think about it.” I thought about that. I asked myself, “Is my position on this really not known?” Snerdley, are you curious as to my position on gay marriage? (interruption) Well, let me try it this way. A friend of mine sent me a note, actually, and it’s got some things in it that I think are on point. As usual, what we’re talking about, again, with the left is the language.

The language game, the left really excels at changing the language to benefit them politically, and they do it in such a way that a lot of people on our side have no idea what’s happened until it’s too late and the issue is already lost, which this issue is. This issue is lost. I don’t care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable — and it’s inevitable because we lost the language on this. I mentioned the other day that I’ve heard people talk about “opposite-sex marriage,” or you might have had heard people say “traditional marriage.”

You might have heard people say “hetero-marriage.” I maintain to you that we lost the issue when we started allowing the word “marriage” to be bastardized and redefined by simply adding words to it, because marriage is one thing, and it was not established on the basis of discrimination. It wasn’t established on the basis of denying people anything. “Marriage” is not a tradition that a bunch of people concocted to be mean to other people with. But we allowed the left to have people believe that it was structured that way.

I would go so far as to say that there are some people who think marriage is an evil Republican idea, simply because they’re the ones that want to hold on to it. So far as I’m concerned, once we started talking about “gay marriage,” “traditional marriage,” “opposite-sex marriage,” “same-sex marriage,” “hetero-marriage,” we lost. It was over. It was just a matter of time. This is the point a friend of mine sent me a note about.

“Once you decide to modify the word ‘marriage,’ then the other side has won, or at least they’re 90% of the way home. The best thing that ‘marriage’ had going for it was basically what they teach you the first day in law school: ‘If you hang a sign on a horse that says “cow,” it does not make it a cow,’ although today it might.” That’s where we are: 5 + 5 could = 11, if it works for the Democrats. A cow could be a horse, if it works for the Democrats. The thing is, discrimination has never been a part of marriage.

It evolved as the best way to unite men and women in raising a family and in cohabitating a life. It’s not perfect. The divorce rate’s what it is. But it evolved with a purpose. It was not a creation of a bunch of elitists wanting to deny people a good time. It was not created as something to deny people “benefits,” but it became that once we started bastardizing the definition. But discrimination is not an issue, and it never was. No one sensible is against giving homosexuals the rights of contract or inheritance or hospital visits.

There’s nobody that wants to deny them that. The issue has always been denying them a status that they can’t have, by definition. By definition — solely, by definition — same-sex people cannot be married. So instead of maintaining that and holding fast to that, we allowed the argument to be made that the definition needed to change, on the basis that we’re dealing with something discriminatory, bigoted, and all of these mystical things that it’s not and never has been.