Isn't "same-sex marriage" an oxymoron (or, a combination of incongruous, contradictory
words)? And isn't "civil union" more fitting -- and more accurate? I think that presenting the
additional marital option of same-sex marriage in our society is at best going to be confusing, and I
think, at worst, make something arguably unethical and mutated, into a
marriage -- making the whole idea of marriage in general, into more of a confusing option. Did you know that in the majority of Europe, except for parts of the middle class, marriage is out of fashion, and that "civil unions" are in? Bye-bye marriage. Bye-bye personal commitment. Bye-bye inseparable union between husband and wife. To say nothing of putting children in our society in a steadily worsening position than they are already in, of multiple divorce and remarriage, causing the erosion of the popularity of the nuclear family (or any predictable family). The standard of marital and family permanence itself is now gone. And under the stewardship of a so-called Christian nation no less. What is left of our once so-called Christian nation has even made itself an irrelevant bystander in this national issue.
We cannot make ourselves irrelevant in the same-sex marriage debate by letting ourselves as Christians be swept into the "religious" category with all of the rest of the world's religions, as having only a religious argument that detractors quickly label as coming from "oppressive religion". Because nature itself, which even people lacking in the Spirit of Christ can understand, argues against same-sex marriage. Nature itself -- God's nature --, that He is the author of, argues against a marriage between people of the same-sex. Because the primary ingredients are missing -- the two totally different organisms it was first based on.
Marriage is not simply a loving, legal, politically correct co-habitation; that would simply be a civil union. A marriage is the union of a man and a woman that produces something which neither of them, man nor woman, can produce alone, nor with someone of their same sex. And we are not talking about children. A marriage contains potential that two men marrying, or two women marrying does not posses. A man and a woman are two very different types of organisms. They have a potential to produce a type of union that is unique in Nature. A system larger than the two of them combined. A miracle of a sort that has been used by God, and His Nature, to balance and harmonize, perpetuate and color His earth. It is unique. And it has been called marriage.
The methodology of Semantics, the building blocks of language, which produced the word that names this unique unit potential, marriage, argues against altering the words definition. Christ's semantics, the perfect language that He and the Father made in the beginning to express His Word -- His message to us -- does not allow for the denial that, "same-sex marriage", is an oxymoron. It is a contradiction in terms. A semantic mess. The established definition of "marriage" was that union which is undertaken by a man and a woman, and can only be poorly imitated two creatures of any other sort, and cannot apply to anything else. Anything else, "Has to get its own word"! (One would think anyway). I thought the science of semantics would resist the dilution of such a unique word. However, it seems more like the definition of any word, as time marches on, will be, as always, subject to the whims of man. In a very real way, once a word is born the way in which a word continues to be used depends on "how men want to use it". As well as the law of the land.
Marriage has always been a legal term. Even in the bible. As we speak, Merriam-Webster has already expanded the definition of marriage to include both men and women of the same sex, but, the law of the land still does not yet permit it. Shouldn't they have to call it "the illegal state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage"? Well for what little it is worth, for a little while anyway, they have the definition wrong until the law of the land finally changes. Until then there should be an asterisk included. A few small regions recently and tenuously legalizing same-sex marriage (possibly temporarily, as America sleeps, but likely not) does not yet warrant a dictionary change.
The marriage, so to speak, of "computers", to "intelligence",
was a marriage resulting in what we now call "artificial intelligence". That will never change. Intelligence came first, before its by-product -- the machine. Raw intelligence will always have it's own unique place in the dictionary. The marriage of a man to a man (what?... can you even do that?), or woman to a woman, is likewise an "artificial product" or "artificial marriage". The word "marriage", was created to denote something unique and specific -- a legal union between a male and a female. Correct me if I'm wrong. And Lord help us if I am.
2 comments:
Just as -- per last weeks NPR article on transgender operations -- you can't completely surgically render a woman into a man or vice verse (you produce something that feels itself as being neither), the same thing holds true with trying to marry two men or two women. You don't produce a "marriage", you produce a "contractual friendship".
Marriage is a cultural universal, existing in some form in every culture. It is defined as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners" (Committee for the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971, 133).
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