The whole Mary-was-a-virgin-forever sounds like an outdated fairy tale to me.
People don't spend hundreds of years building up a case for something that is "just a fairy tale".
This is something, however, that if someone doesn't believe you really just can't convince them. I have more evidence to trot out, but what's the point? Everything I have said thus far has totally fallen on deaf ears.
As a practicing Catholic, you presumably believe that Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Baha'i, Hinduism, Jainism, etc., and to a lesser extent Protestantism, Mormonism, etc., are false and essentially "fairy tales." Yet obviously adherents of those faiths have spent hundreds of years building cases for them.
As far as the actual faith tenet goes, I have a few questions:
- Why does it matter? Married couples are supposed to have sex. It's only logical and obvious (to me) to assume that Mary and Joseph had sex.
- How can anyone really know anyway? That's something that's very easily falsifiable.
Anyway, I'm not trying to be difficult, I just don't see what the big hoopla is about.