Me

Same Sex Marriage

I'm not yet sure about the conclusion of this article, but I do think this is a erlatively simple issue. Let's go:

First, we have to agree about the rights of gays. I'm ok with gays doing whatever they want, as long as there is no exploitation or anything like this. So, if you don't agree with this, there's no point continue reading any of this.

Second, we have to agree on the meaning of the word "marriage". Here it is less clear, and I'm open to accept either of the following options. Before we jump to the options, we first must agree that until some time ago (just to be on the safe side let's say 100 years), the meaning of the word "marriage" was the formalize union of a man and a woman. Simply in the minds of the people back then, the notion of accepted same-sex formalized union did not even occur. and hence the meaning was very clear. Now let's go to the two options:

option 1: the meaning of the word "marriage" should not be changed. Changing it is just playing with semantics in order to achieve a political goal. This is bad. The whole point of a language is for people to communicate, and changing meaning of words is counter productive in that regard.

option 2: the meaning of the word "marriage" should be changed, and actually it already have. Language is a living thing, and as societies and ideas develop, the language develop with them. I'm sure there are other examples of this (e.g. "call me" used to mean a different thing 100 years ago than it does now).

Now, I tend to adopt option 1, simply because I feel changing the meaning is done against the majority of people (religious etc), which BTW for them the word has much more meaning than to seculars like me. But, this is a relatively minor issue, since:

If we adopt option 1, the solution should be: remove the marriage concept from the law book. The state should not care about marriage. The state may care about a union between people, but it should not care whether they are of the same sex or not, or whether they are 2, 3, or 10. As long as these are consenting adults - go with it. We must change the law system to accomodate that.

If we adopt option 2, then of course same-sex marriage is just marriage and should be the same as any other kind of marriage.

So in conclusion, I would prefer we adopt option 1, and remove reference to "marriage" from our laws. "Marriage" will remain a religious or some other kind of activity people may do, but which the state does not care about.

But practically, if this is too hard to achieve nowadays, I would go with option 2, since the rights of gays are more important to me than logics and linguistics ...

posted by Me @ 2:42 AM