“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean . . neither more nor less.”
Today the news reported that California has actually begun to dispense ‘marriage’ licenses for homosexuals. In the news report it was noted that State officials, being the clever bunch that they are, had changed the licenses which previously had spaces for the names of the ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ to provide spaces for the names of ‘partner A’ and ‘partner B.’
I thought that odd.
I means, hells bells, if your going to go ahead and redefine the meaning of the word ‘marriage’ so that it no longer means the joining of a man and woman in a covenantal bond why not go ahead and change the meaning of the words ‘bride’ and ‘groom.’ If the word ‘marriage’ can now mean the ‘uniting’ (even that word needs to be redefined) of two people of the same sex (and what does the word ’sex’ mean anyway?), why does the word ‘bride’ have to carry the connotation of a female party? And why does the word ‘groom’ have to carry the connotation of a male party? And for that matter what do ‘male’ and ‘female’ really mean?
And why stop there? If we are about redefining words to fit our pleasures then why should we constrain and limit the word ‘marriage’ to two parties? If we are about redefining words to fit our pleasures then why should we constrain and limit the word ‘bride’ and ‘groom’ to refer to human species? Is it only social convention that prevents us from defining marriage as a joining of three or more species?
There was a time when the Lewis Carroll quote we started with was clearly understood as satire.
