Trick Question

I saw an online test that was supposed to help you figure out where you are on the political spectrum. Okay. Fine. I'm curious. So I took it. (Imagine my surprise when it said I was largely a centrist.) One question (as you might expect) wanted to know where you stand on banning gay marriage. And I was stuck.

It's a trick question, a false dichotomy. "Look, you're either in favor of gay marriage or against it. What's the problem?" The problem is you're asking me about something that doesn't exist -- "gay mirage."

Someone asked once, "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" The answer is "4" because legs have a particular function and merely redesignating a tail to be a leg won't let that dog walk on it. Too obtuse? How about if I rename a hammer as a screwdriver? How will that work? It doesn't, of course. And that's the point. "Marriage" isn't merely a word that we pull out and apply as necessary. It has a purpose, a use. It does something, accomplishes something, produces something. Factor in "gay" and it does not. It may accomplish something else, but not the original purpose. It may give you the rights to visit people in the hospital that marriage gives or it might give you the rights to own and inherit property that marriage gives, but it doesn't do what marriage does. It isn't, then, "marriage" in principle.

"So, you'd like to ban gay marriage." No, I'd like to properly differentiate between "marriage" as it has always been used and "marriage" as it is now applied. When the homosexual community "went to war" in California to get this "gay marriage" thing pushed through (against the will of the people and, ultimately, the state constitution), they already had in California a status called "civil union" that gave them all the same rights that marriage gave to married couples. So why did they do it? Why did they push further into marriage -- into destroying the longstanding, traditional definition of marriage and substituting their own? I would imagine for a variety of reasons, but the most glaring one, I think, is legitimacy. Calling a disabled person disabled differentiates them from the ... abled person. It stings. Calling a mentally deficient person a moron differentiates them from the non-mentally deficient person. So we changed the word. It became "retarded" (which simply means "a little slower"). After awhile that became offensive, so we've changed it again. Why did it become offensive? Because it differentiated. What those "outside" -- be it "gay" or "disabled" or "mentally challenged" or any other "other" category -- want is to be in. Unconsciously, perhaps, "differentiated" is bad. It is true. It is factual. It is real. There are differences. In some circles they even encourage vive la différence! But no one really wants to celebrate it; they want to eliminate it. In the gay community as in any other, the desire to be on the inside rather than on the outside is sufficient to require by force of law that marriage no longer exist as it once did and everyone is required to change their definition to suit them.

I don't want to ban gay marriage. I want to eliminate it as a concept. That, of course, can't be done by force of law. I want people to remember (or even learn for the first time) what "marriage" really is. Feel free to pick another word if you wish. If you want, you can assign another word to what I'm talking about. But when "marriage" has the capacity to apply "gay" as a modifier, the concept I'm talking about has vanished so completely that most people these days don't seem to know what it was. In a sense, when "gay marriage" became a thing, marriage was outlawed. I want marriage back (Gen 2:20, 22-24; Matt 19:4-6; Prov 5:18-19; Eph 5:22-33; 1 Cor 7:1-5; Heb 13:4-7; Gen 1:27-28; 9:7).