The politics category over there is usually just for show. I\’m interested in politics, and I read up on what\’s going on, but I\’m not terribly opinionated.

And I\’m afraid of alienating future friends or employers. Or angering my girlfriend.

Kidding, baby! Just… kidding…

Anyway, this results in infrequent and poor writing about the topic. That\’s a good thing, though. If you\’re going to write poorly about something, you should at least do it infrequently.

So, yesterday Mi Presidente Bush finally came out in support of the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA). My assistant tells me this proposed constitutional amendment would seek to \”define marriage in the United States as a union only between a man and a woman. It would override any laws in the individual states that allow for the recognition of same-sex couples.\”

So, aside from all the problems I have with this, I have a big problem with this. It goes like this:

The Constitution is not a dictionary. I don\’t have The Constitution sitting in my lower-left desk drawer.

Nor will I Constitution-check this document when I\’m finished writing.

Because these words I\’m using are MY WORDS, and I\’m EXTRA SENSITIVE about that because these days they\’re among the most valuable things I have.

They mean whatever I want them to mean. If I want to say that my dog Skittles and my cat Spanky are married because they have slept together in the same room for 7 years and tried to have intercourse several times, The Constitution can\’t tell me I\’m wrong.

So the problem with the whole gay marriage debate is that people are arguing over the meaning of words. But as I have confusedly illustrated above, words mean different things to different people. And there\’s no dictionary in the world that can change that.

Dictionaries react to the changing meanings of words. True, a dictionary can shape the way people understand words, but in the end, words mean what people use them to mean, not what the dictionary says they mean.

Now, if the government wants to create a name for two people living together and sharing their lives and serving each other, that would be great. They could call it a \”civil union\” or a \”civil commitment\” or even a \”50-percent-likelyhood-of-divorce contract\”.

Whatever the name, it would only make sense if everybody had an equal opportunity to use it. Because the law shouldn\’t care what color your skin is, and it shouldn\’t care if you\’re rich or poor, and it shouldn\’t care what kinda\’ equipment you got \’tween yo\’ legs.

Of course, churches and synagogues and mosques and satanic cults and the like could all have their own definitions for the word \”marriage.\” And if Spanky and Skittles went to the Lutheran Church of Funk, NE to get married and were turned away, well, that\’s between Skittles and Spanky and the Reverend of Funk.

If the religious meaning of marriage were separated from the political meaning, religious groups would be free to define the words as they saw fit. Some would accept gay marriage, others wouldn\’t. Religious organizations would be free to define marriage differently for heterosexuals and homosexuals.

They could even say that certain kinds of marriages were sins, and people who married that way were going to hell.

But the government is not a church, and the constitution is not the Bible.

So the constitution can\’t define marriage one way for a certain group of people and a different way for another group of people.

Just like it can\’t define an education one way for whites and another way for blacks. Just like it can\’t define citizenship one way for men and another way for women.

Because the constitution doesn\’t define words. It just ensures that whatever the word, be it freedom, education, voting, or marriage, that word is applied the same way to everybody.

The last thing the constitution should do is to establish different legal definitions of a word for different kinds of people.

So if people want to go on arguing about what the word \”marriage\” means, that\’s fine with me, as long as they keep the constitution out of it.

I just hope they don\’t decide to include cats and dogs in the definition; I\’m having enough trouble keeping Spanky and Skittles apart as it is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2004 at 11:51 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.