My old friend MB (who goes to college in Massachusetts; I think he's in graduate school now), responding to my entry about gay marriage, wrote:

If this whole thing were about "rights" it would be one thing, but upon review of the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court ruling, and conversation with the lawyer who represented the plaintiffs, I find that hard to believe. The extent to which the campaign for gay marriage is taken, at least by some here in Bay State, amounts to a "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" attitude. [. . .] While it's true that at one point in U.S. history, too few years ago, interracial marriage was prohibited, it was never true that Webster's defined marriage as "a union between whites and whites, or blacks and blacks" -- although it DOES define marriage as a union between man and woman. The SJC ruling flies in the face of the English language. [. . .] The lawyer in this case told me that civil unions would create "second-class citizens" because they NEED the word marriage. I don't buy it. Separate but equal was unequal because different facilities clearly meant degraded facilities for blacks and turned them into social pariahs (or, rather, reinforced their positions as social pariahs). Separate terms for different sorts of unions does nothing of the sort, any less than separate terms for 'father' and 'mother' makes either one less of a parent."

I decided to go and read the SJC ruling, titled Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. (Supreme Judicial Court is Massachusetts' particular name for its state Supreme Court. They also like to call themselves a "commonwealth." They're strange there.) The opinion talks about how civil marriage -- state recognition of marriage through licensing -- is one of the "police powers" of the state, but the issue of the Fourteenth Amendment exists because "The benefits accessible only by way of a marriage license are enormous, touching nearly every aspect of life and death. The [state health] department states that 'hundreds of statutes' are related to marriage and to marital benefits." Okay, so why not let them get married?

It's just not quite the same. "Marriage" in the traditional sense involves the possibility of procreation; such a thing is impossible between homosexual couples. And yet, the ruling notes:

The judge in the Superior Court endorsed the first rationale, holding that "the state's interest in regulating marriage is based on the traditional concept that marriage's primary purpose is procreation." This is incorrect. Our laws of civil marriage do not privilege procreative heterosexual intercourse between married people above every other form of adult intimacy and every other means of creating a family. General Laws c. 207 contains no requirement that the applicants for a marriage license attest to their ability or intention to conceive children by coitus. Fertility is not a condition of marriage, nor is it grounds for divorce.

Is there, then, a definition of marriage that includes all heterosexual couples (including infertile ones) but excludes homosexual couples? The Oxford English Dictionary, the last word on the English language, defines marriage as "the condition of being a husband or wife; the relation between persons married to each other; matrimony." It also notes that "the term is now sometimes used with reference to long-term relationships between partners of the same sex."

Yet, I'm still loathe to put homosexual marriage on par with heterosexual marriage. It's just not the same. The institution of marriage, as it has existed for practically forever, has always involved men and women. Only in the last forty years have we been asked to change our idea of what marriage is. This is by no means a convincing argument; "because that's how we've always done it" is never valid. MB says, though, "I have no problem with a civil union setup that confers *every single benefit* of marriage -- without calling it that."

Does "separate but equal" apply in this case? Legally, yes. Homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is not a choice (apparently). Thus, couples should not be legally denied certain rights based upon decisions in which they had no part. On the other hand, in terms of terminology, are we obliged to call the union of homosexuals "marriage"? No; in this matter "separate but equal" does not have to call them the same thing, because they are inherently not the same thing. Giving gay couples the same legal rights as everyone else is as far as we need to go; altering our concepts of marriage, and giving homosexual couples vindication by making their marriage as "normal" as heterosexual marriage, is not the state's job. Homosexual marriage is not as normal as heterosexual marriage, and that is the key to attempts to use the word "marriage" to describe gay unions: homosexuals want a moral acknowledgment -- imposed upon us by the state -- that their union is the same as heterosexuals' unions. But it is not.