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• Sunday, August 17, 2008 10:19 PM

  Arouete

  When you talk about ”...the ‘fundamental’ civil right of SECULAR marriage...” I feel I need to know more about this right. I'm not even going to get into what "fundamental" means. I want to be more practical than that.

  I hope you'll concede that the institution of marriage has, along the way, accumulated some co-terminology that has historical, habitual cultural meaning and value. Or, if you feel the terminology does NOT have value in today's world, then I hope you'll admit changing it to mean something else, or ignoring it in selected circumstances, involves cranking a big whoop-de-doo into the English language?

  I ask because of the terms husband and wife. Let's not pretend those two words are not as stone-set into our lingo as the word marriage itself, okay? They are as much as part of marriage as mother and father are of family; as, at least to a biologist, male and female are of sex; as yin and yang are to the whole of Buddhist existence. Okay, so what’s in a word, you object. And I respond: unless we want to go back to grunting and pointing, everything.

  So. In a gay marriage, as opposed to a civil union or SECULAR union – lovely, unbaggaged terms that over time can acquire their own patina of respectability, solidity and beauty – who is the husband and who is the wife? At some point, this must be decided or new terminology has to be created, the old terminology dragged kicking and screaming into retirement. If we’re going to use a perfectly good and unambiguous word -- marriage -- to describe something that for thousands of years it has notdescribed, can we at least define the subsidiary terms accordingly.

  I leave it up to you. What do we do with husband and wife?

  —Jim Read Jim's other letters
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