So I was wrangling about the gay marriage thing, trying to mediate the Fourteenth Amendment with MB's comment that there is no "right" to gay marriage. But neither is there a "right" to heterosexual marriage. So I asked a friend about this. And she said that the problem is that there are really two kinds of marriage in the United States. The first kind is the legal marriage, what you get when you go to the courthouse and file an application for a marriage license or get married by a justice of the peace. When we talk about "gay marriage," this is really what we're talking about, since this is the kind of marriage that confers legal benefits on the partners, and this is what gay marriage advocates are fighting for. I have no problem with this.

The second kind of marriage is the religious marriage. Don't forget that marriage is also a religious ceremony, and in this country where Puritan religious ideals blend in with the law, the religious ceremony has a secular counterpart. No one would advocate a law forcing churches to confer the sacrament of marriage upon gay couples if it didn't want to, and no one is. Churches will decide whom they want to marry, and I have no problem with this.

But why do people like President Bush (who said yesterday that he supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage) insist on using the word "civil union"? Largely because the word "marriage" is loaded with quite a bit of meaning. MB told me that he doesn't agree with the analogy between interracial marriages and the current gay marriage controversy because the dictionary never defined marriage as between two people of the same race; it does, however, define marriage as between two people of opposite genders. But even the Oxford English Dictionary, the staunch lexicon of English, admits that the word "marriage" is being used to describe same-sex couples who enter into a binding relationship just like heterosexuals do. The dictionary does not set the meanings of words in stone; rather, it reflects the current usage of words. Even though the singular for data is datum, the dictionary admits that the plural form is commonly used in both the singular and plural senses. It is we who define words by their use, and then these uses make their way into the dictionary. The dictionary is a reflection of words; it does not explain the "correct" definitions of words and it is not a keeper of the Platonic forms of words. Thus, we may alter the definition of "marriage" and the dictionary definition cannot stop us, for meanings of words are altered all the time. (Although, this only happens when many people start using words in an altered sense; when only a few people go against the grain, they are not innovative, but "incorrect.")

Homosexuals insist on the use of the word "marriage" not for its legal value but for its cultural value. To say that gay marriages are merely "civil unions" is to say that they are a second-class marriage, not a "real" marriage as far as our culture is concerned. The use of the word "marriage" amounts to an endorsement of the homosexual lifestyle. It brings it up from the depths of cultural abberation to something as normal as Ward and June's lifestyle. I have no problem with this, either; I am still free to think that it is a cultural abberation if I wish (even though I don't). As long as I am not impacted by the choice of a particular group of people, that group can do whatever it wants.

But in comes the proposed constitutional amendment. Why? It's the "activist judges" again. How are these so-called activists wrenching the definition of marriage away from the people? Perhaps they are wrenching the definition away from Bush and other conservatives, but it is not their job to pander to the opinions of a particular group of people. The definition of marriage is changing in this country, whether Bush and the Religious Right want to admit it or not (this is the same head-in-the-sand attitude that they take with sex education; by funding solely abstinence-only programs, he can pretend that sex among teenagers doesn't happen). Court judges do not set standards of how people should live. That's not their job, and it is not the government's job to teach people a particular set of morals. I assert that it is Bush who is the activist in his attempt to force a particular moral standard on the United States, to prevent things from changing. Society does change, and it is the job of the courts to acknowledge and respect these changes, as long as they don't break any laws. If they do, then it is their job to look to the higher form of Justice, just as the justices in Brown v. Board of Education did when they realized that an earlier Supreme Court decision had legally rendered blacks second-class citizens. Would Republicans argue that that decision was a case of "activism"? Because it was, by Bush's definition -- and built into that definition is a particular appeal to the idea that "we are the majority, and we make the rules." Plessy v. Ferguson was acceptable because of the ethics of the day, not the law. In the same way, Bush's definition of "activism" encompasses his ethics, not the law.

To those who maintain that the Constitution is not a living document, I ask: why the amendments? Why amendments 9 and 10, which state that the Bill of Rights does not enumerate all of a person's rights and also says that any rights not granted to the federal government are reserved for the states and the people? Sounds pretty open to interpretation to me. If the writers of the Constitution had intended for it to be read to the letter, they would have enumerated all of a person's rights. Similarly, if the writers wanted to keep the United States in an 18th-century mindset, they would have prevented it from being amendable, but they understood that times do change and the law must change with the times (there were laws once that sanctioned the treatment of blacks as second-class citizens. Where did they go? Oh, yeah: society's opinions changed, and the law changed with them. Otherwise, we'd still be living in the 19th century).