Blind to Meanings

Another example of the fact that conservatives just don't get it. From Time:

When a Jewish boy turns 13, he heads to a temple for a deeply meaningful rite of passage, his bar mitzvah. When a Catholic girl reaches about the same age, she stands in front of the local bishop, who touches her forehead with holy oil as she is confirmed into a 2,000-year-old faith tradition. But missing in each of those cases — and in countless others of equal religious importance — is any role for government. There is no baptism certificate issued by the local courthouse and no federal tax benefit attached to the confessional booth, the into-the-water-and-out born-again ceremony or any of the other sacraments that believers hold sacred.

Only marriage gets that treatment, and it's a tradition that some legal scholars have been arguing should be abandoned.

The solution, which this article somewhat laughably calls "Solomonic," is to hand the word "marriage" over to the churches. This presupposes that the word "marriage" is and has been a purely religious term, which is demonstrably not the case: as I've stated any number of times here, marriage as an institution has historically and culturally had a much broader implication than the merely sectarian. Marriage has always been at least as much a civil institution as a religious one, and in most periods, much more so.

The article does actually touch on one of the core issues here:

For many couples joined in matrimony, having the state no longer call them married may make them feel as if something important had been taken away — even if it's hard to define just what was lost. And for many others — the folks who feel most strongly about marriage and most passionately supported the expensive campaign to defeat gay marriage — the issue of nomenclature is only the beginning. They are against not just gay marriage but also gay couples — and especially against government sanctioning of those relationships, no matter what they are called.

Anti-gay conservatives don't want to "preserve" marrriage -- they want to wipe out any chance of legal and social support for gay families in order to make the civil law fit their narrow worldview.

There is also the fact that the courts more than once have very carefully defined what is lost by taking away the word "marriage." That is, of course, exactly what the social conservatives want to take away: the social status of "married" for gay couples.

In spite of the tone of the article, this is neither a new solution nor a particularly creative one. As Andrew Sullivan points out, this is a "solution" that's been around as long as the debate, and it never has addressed the core meaning of the word or the institution.

I'm so tired of this kind of crap being treated as though it had some validity.