homosexuals and goldfish

Another well thought out post by Doug Wilson on the changing of the definition of marriage. Believer - do not be deceived - read this more than once if you need to.

Homosexual radicals want to say that what they are about is simply trying to expand the size of the civil rights direct object in our sentences, when what they really want to do is completely alter the meaning of the verb. Before examining what this means for the future of marriage, allow me to illustrate my point with a few overdone cut-out samples glued to popsicle sticks.

Say we are talking about swanky condominiums, and the debate before the house is whether or not we should sell any of them to people with skin that is darker than mine. This is a genuine debate about the direct object -- shall owners of condominiums be allowed to be a different average hue than they used to be? But suppose the group in question is not characterized by their skin color, but rather by the fact that they are deadbeats, flakes, penniless, broke, and on top of everything else, feeling pretty entitled. Suppose somebody insists on selling a condominium to their chief spokesman, an out-at-elbows gent named Chicago Jake. If we do this, we are not expanding the pool of potential condominium owners. We are completely altering what it means to "sell" something. By expanding the pool of buyers to include those who have no money, we have destroyed the meaning of the verb to buy, and hence we have not really expanded anything.

If you print a trillion dollar coin for every American, that behavior could be described any number of ways, but expanding everybody's purchasing power would not be one of them. But I was talking about sex and marriage, not leftist economics, but to him who has wisdom, let him understand. It is all the same hooey, anywhere you look.

So with marriage. In previous eras, there have been times when particular classes of people (like slaves, for example) were not permitted to marry. They could cohabit, they could have sex, and they could have children, but could not marry. To expand the boundaries of marriage for them would be the right thing to do, and to expand the rights of marriage in this way would be a genuine civil rights issue. Marriage would be growing, and with no redefinition of marriage involved. We would have more marriages, but no increase of confusion about what constitutes a marriage.

The same with the Supreme Court decision in 1967(!) in Loving v. Virginia. When the Court (rightly) decided against laws prohibiting miscegenation, they were expanding marital options in a way that was defended a right understanding of civil rights. It is none of the government's business if a black man and a white woman decide to marry, and it is a violation of their civil rights to prohibit it. And when all is said and done, the resultant marriages were recognizable marriages. Access to the ordinance of marriage was expanded, not redefined.

Now let us jump way on the other side of what homosexual radicals are currently demanding, and let us do this, not to irritate them, but to make an important point. As we make this jump, let us make sure to diligently use the traditional marital terminology -- and we are doing this to make it plain that if we travel a certain distance from one man/one woman marriage, at a particular tipping point, we have changed the meaning of the verb to marry.

There are many options along the way, some of them marital, some sub-marital, and eventually, some contra-marital. How much sand can you put in the sugar bowl before it isn't sugar any more?

Bear with me. Suppose a man wants to marry his goldfish, his BMW, or himself, and he insists on using the word "marry." If we let him do it, something has to give, and it will be the definition of that verb.

If you have been following me, then somewhere between a one man/one woman covenanted union, which absolutely everyone recognizes as marriage, and the goldfish debacle, we have abandoned our verb. That being the case, it would be worthwhile discussing just exactly where that point of abandonment was. If we drive north from Nebraska, at some point we will cross the border into Canada. Some of us in the back seat want to know where that will be exactly. All we want to do is find our passports, which will provide us with an excuse to get out of the car. Does that make us haters?

Those pressing for marriage equality are a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. I would submit that this line of thought I am suggesting is not new to them, and I would suggest further that this is actually the whole point. The point is not to give marriage, old definition, to homosexuals, at which point the revolution goes mysteriously into hibernation, but rather to take the old definition away from absolutely everyone.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that if a mind has grown to accommodate a new thought, it can never after that point resume it's original shape. The same thing can be said, but to a less flattering purpose, about words that have been stretched out of all recognition.

But the man asking for marriage equality says that he is not a radical. What if he simply wants to include homosexuals in the bond that two share for life? But certain questions spring immediately to mind. Two? Where did we get that sick and puritanical limitation? And what do you mean "for life?" What a bunch of Pharisees. That noted sexual bigot, Jeffery John, has maintained that marriage has to be "a covenant of total sexual fidelity and indissoluble union." I guess it is not just heterosexuals who get stuck in the fifties.

Is adultery even a legal category anymore? Does marriage mark out an exclusive sexual relationship? Why should it? Who says?

And returning to those truncated and tiny souls who would restrict the polyamorous man, differently-gifted as a hunka hunka burning love, to just one partner . . . words fail me. Does not the Koran say that each man gets four? And no less a luminary and Islamic scholar than Gloria Steinem has gone on record as supporting marriages that would require a couple of California king-sized beds pushed together.

So the issue is not what the first or second guy in line is asking for. A longer line than that has already formed -- and the first radicals left their arguments on the counter here, and they are of a sort that will enable anybody to make their case for ruining an already ruined word still further. Do we really think the first radicals in line will become the last conservatives?

Just as an Idaho environmentalist is a Californian who bought his lake cabin here last year, will homosexuals gain the right to marry, and then man the ramparts to repeal no-fault divorce laws, impose strict penalties for adultery, fight the good fight against polygamy, and so on? If you want someone to applaud their future efforts, you will have to find someone less cynical than I to do it.

We have been caught in the machinations of our own tricksiness. We cannot extricate ourselves, except by repentance, and such repentance would require us to accept the set boundaries of marriage on the word and authority of the one who made us. And He has set apart marriage, as the memorable words of the prayer book have it, "to joyne together this man and this woman in holy matrimony, which is an honorable state, instytuted of God in Paradise, in the time of manes innocencie."

The time of man's innocency was a long time ago, but the point remains.