Re: Totaling the Ferrari: Ferris Bueller Revisited
"Peter T. Chattaway" <petert-LOVM4QxV+tDq6eQxt3vRmLDks+cytr/[email protected]>
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> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/01/20/totaling-the-ferrari-ferris-bueller-revisited/ > January 20, 2011 | by Caleb Crain > My husband and I . . . This is a bit of a tangent, but FWIW, I'm assuming Caleb is a guy. So, this reference to his husband reminds me a bit of how Jane Lynch, in accepting her Golden Globe last week, gave a shout-out to her wife. We'll be seeing a lot more of this in years to come, and it just goes to underscore the point that I've been making for quite some time now, which is that all the legal debates over activist judges etc. are ultimately kind of irrelevant. What matters here is *society* and where the *social norms* are going -- and it will happen one person at a time, in dinner parties and other small, social settings, as people casually introduce their same-sex significance others as "husbands" or "wives" and everyone else is faced with a choice of quibbling over the vocabulary, which would seem kind of rude, or tacitly accepting the new definitions. Staunchly conservative types who oppose "gay marriage" in any way, shape or form can, of course, choose to risk seeming rude instead of accepting the new definitions. But this situation poses an interesting dilemma for people like me, who are inclined to think that there should be a sharp distinction between civil marriage and religious marriage. (Although, I repeat: the legalities are ultimately irrelevant here. When you're sitting at a table and the person across from you calls the person next to him his "husband", it's a *social* matter, not a *legal* one.) Perhaps, arguably, we should use the new definitions in these public settings, but what sort of effect does the ongoing exterior use of the new vocabulary have on our *inner* vocabulary, as it were? What sort of effect does our spoken language have on the way we think within our own minds? -- dadl-ot mailing list http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot