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February 16, 2005
Same sex marriage
I'm very jealous of people who can find a soul mate; someone they'd like to publicly announce their love for and intention to live with for the rest of their life. Whether they be a man and woman, man and man or woman and woman, it thrills me that they've got someone to love. Having said that, I am very uncomfortable with the idea of same sex marriage. Not against the union, just the co-opting of the term 'marriage' to mean something other than one man and one woman in a union. Why can't there be another term? We can adjust the laws (and, no doubt, the Charter of Rights) to include the new term. Why take a word which has traditional, strongly held ideas already attached to it? I suspect because they want the same feelings attached to their new union as is normally attached to a traditional marriage. If that's true, that's not good enough. Why glom on to that history and distort it? Or, why not choose the word 'puppy' then, or 'spaghetti'; they both create warm feelings too. It would be better to come up with a new term and build up its own meaning.
Posted by John at February 16, 2005 06:05 PM
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Comments
When they started letting women have jobs I was OK with that but why call it jobs when, of course, a "job" implies something a man has. Its fine for women to have jobs but lets just call it something else.
When they started letting black people vote I was OK with that but why call it voting when, of course, a "voting" implies something a white person does. Its fine for black people to vote to have vote but lets just call it something else.
etc.
Posted by: davem at February 28, 2005 01:01 PM
Sorry Dave but you're out to lunch here. Job has never meant work specifically done by a man, so of course it could be applied to women and voting has never had any implication of race (or sex for that matter) so of course it should apply to all people, whereas marriage has traditionally -- i.e. always -- meant a union between a man and a woman. If you don't want to take my word for it, check dictionary.com.
If a group decided to try changing the meaning of the word 'job' to only mean work done by men then it would be similar to the current issue with 'marriage'.
Posted by: John at March 19, 2005 11:06 PM