New York

I haven't written here for some time, and probably should sleep on this one before I get yelled at, but somehow this time I just can't keep my big mouth (fat fingers?) shut (in my pockets?)

New York now makes gay marriage legal.

I have a problem with the word "gay" as used here - the word used to have a meaning, something like happy or joyous - now it no longer means just that, and I have to be careful where and how I say it lest I be misunderstood.  Words mean things, or anyhow they did when I was young, naive and stupid.

So let's make it clear for old idjits like me - New York has now changed its law to make marriage between two persons of the same sex legal.  Or anyhow, they are calling the social uniting of two people of the same sex a marriage.

"Marriage" just joined "Gay" in the list of words that no longer has meaning.  For thousands of years I knew what it meant - now I am no longer sure.

I asked a dear friend why another word could not have been chosen to indicate a state like matrimony, but different in that it did not join two people of opposite sexes, could not have a reasonable expectation of procreation, and was an evolutionary dead end within one generation.

What I got was resoundingly denounced as old, meanspirited, sexist, prejudiced, and even probably wishing to keep people of color enslaved.  All this for asking a question....

And I don't see any parallel at all with the old issue of miscegenation - after all, the union involved a man and a woman - the so-called race issue was one trumped up to keep a minority convinced it was a minority in terms of value (about which I'll have more to say later....)

Two men cannot reproduce without the intervention of a third party who is not a man.  Does this mean that two homosexual men should become the object of a woman's polyandrous affections?  I thought the idea was to keep the women out of the males' lives - but they can't reproduce without a woman, so they are going against themselves - where's the fun in that? And how can someone who would scorn the 97% of the population as "Breeders" lower himself/herself (itself?) to couple with a person so obviously inferior or disgusting?

Then I thought about two women having the same problem - in order to reproduce, there has to be a man somewhere - leading to the spectre of a polygynous relationship for the man - when the two women involved want nothing at all to do with men; they have to involve a man or the "race" dies out within one generation.

There was an article in Town Hall this morning, Marriage Cannot Be Redefined that caused me to start to think about this again, and stirred in me the realization that it's a game, and the only end to the game has no words having anything like a meaning we all know.  Kinda like the Red Queen (in "Alice") - "A word means what I choose it to mean, no more and no less!" - except in the case of gay marriage, there are as many red queens as there are marriages, so the word is reduced to a state of meaninglessness.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that, for me anyhow, there is an intrinsic wrongness in allowing 3% of the population to cause a word that had meaning to the other 97% suddenly to become meaningless to that other 97% of the population.  We invent new words all the time - why not here?

The distortion is such that it makes noise in my head - almost as if I had a pet cat, which died, so I got a pet skunk, but insisted on calling it a cat even though a deep breath would convince anyone that it was not a cat - except for myself who is sure that it is a cat - it has four legs, claws and a tail - must be a cat, right?

Call the simile ridiculous if it pleases you, but think about it - is it any less strange than calling a marriage "the same" as what used to be a marriage when it now is supposed not to care about the sex of either partner?

I'll probably have more to mutter about this; right now what I see before us is madness - a tower of Babel, if you will, brought to us by the so-called Progressive People, who will not rest until every word we have ever relied upon to have meaning and to help us make decisions is rendered devoid of meaning.

I have spoken (written?)!