Greg weighs in on Gay Marriage

[georgetheduck]

This is in response to a discussion on Jon's Blog. The comment section was getting crowded, so I decided to post my essay of a response here rather than there.

Yeah, I know it's been done to death, but I've recently put some thought into this and clarified my own views on the topic. Read on if you're not too tired of it all to care:

Comments

[tanjay_1]

So upon returning marriage to its rightful owner, must we then return the thousands of words cannabalized into the English language to their rightful cultures? Why not separate our language into its two distinct parts: *real* English, and the bits we stole from others?

Language evolves forwards, not back. More importantly though, the church did not invent marriage -- sacred unions were happening in parts of Asia and Africa before Christianity even existed. Ancient Asian rites and Hellenic Greeks incorporated the perfectly ordinary unions of men into their definitions of marriage. These were suppressed only upon Christian reform, which promoted procreation to sustain a population of crusaders.

If we were to give the Christian church exclusive use of the word "marriage", must we then be forbidden to use phrases like "the brilliant marriage of flavours" when discussing fine cuisine? Sounds ridiculous, but the only reason this phrase seems less inappropriate than "same-sex marriage" is because it does not trigger deeply-rooted bigotry. By your logic, both would be equally inappropriate uses of a sacred word used to define one thing and one thing only. In reality, two men or two women who love each other comes closer to the church's definition of marriage than two flavours in a stew.

Ignorance, not the need for semantic precision, is what drives this argument.

[georgetheduck]

well, I wasn't in fact suggesting that the church own the word "marriage" entirely, but rather that they would retain the right to call their institution of "marriage" by it's original name.

If you prefer, you can call my two institutions "secular marriage" and "sacred marriage". That way, both types of couples can declare themselves "married" without necessarily specifying whether they are married in the eyes of the law or of the church, or both. The important thing is that you have TWO, SEPARATE institutions, and that's actually the extent of my argument. The semantics should merely function to distinguish the two.

The assumption of ignorance can be just as poisonous as ignorance itself.