G Day
When I began writing this entry, it was June 6th--D Day--and President Bush had just proposed his Protection of Marriage Amendment. Before I could even organize my thoughts about the matter, it was DOA in the Senate. It will be resurrected, of course, by somebody even if it isn't President Bush.
I'm not here to dismiss anyone who opposes gay marriage in principle as a heartless bigot, but I find the primary argument in the debate baseless. Something about marriage defined as a union between a man and a woman being the basis for civil society all these centuries. I won't say that's altogether false, but it's woefully incomplete. Many societies of the past tolerated far greater sexual deviance than ours does and, as far as I know, it was never the sole reason--and rarely even a contributory reason--for their collapse. If you don't believe me, check out the excesses of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
And as far as defining marriage goes, it sounds more like semantics to me. Ike and Tina's relationship was called a marriage; Hank VIII (pronounced vee-eye-eye-eye) had wives executed and marriages annulled at a whim; husbands murder wives, wives murder husbands, and some of the most important people in history have been in troubled marriages. If these perversions of marriage take place and society presses on, why trivialize the Constitution by transforming it into a kind of dictionary?
In retrospect, it might have been wiser for Bush to keep his mouth shut on gay marriage, in light of the recent demise of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. Bush can still, of course, tout this as a victory in the War on Terror, but with the door slammed shut so abruptly on his domestic proposal, it will now look like a week of mixed results for him. By the way, I neither need nor want to see pictures of a dead guy in the newspaper.
D-Day has come and gone and this time, didn't hear many people talking about it; they were too preoccupied with the whole 666 thing. Do I even have to start on the cretinous, superstitious nonsense of numbers? It's the same with 13. Let me ask this: How can the number 666 mean anything intrinsically when it was the Arabs who came up with their current appearance? If 666 were truly the mark of the beast, wouldn't it appear as VI VI VI? The current numerical system wasn't even devised until the 9th Century AD and wasn't adapted by Western Europe until 300 years later. Does the symbolic nature of numbers transfer from language to language and culture to culture? I suppose anything's possible, but I have trouble getting shaken up about it.
Thank you for reading, and remember, if you don't like this blog, XIII VI VI VI on you!
I'm not here to dismiss anyone who opposes gay marriage in principle as a heartless bigot, but I find the primary argument in the debate baseless. Something about marriage defined as a union between a man and a woman being the basis for civil society all these centuries. I won't say that's altogether false, but it's woefully incomplete. Many societies of the past tolerated far greater sexual deviance than ours does and, as far as I know, it was never the sole reason--and rarely even a contributory reason--for their collapse. If you don't believe me, check out the excesses of the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
And as far as defining marriage goes, it sounds more like semantics to me. Ike and Tina's relationship was called a marriage; Hank VIII (pronounced vee-eye-eye-eye) had wives executed and marriages annulled at a whim; husbands murder wives, wives murder husbands, and some of the most important people in history have been in troubled marriages. If these perversions of marriage take place and society presses on, why trivialize the Constitution by transforming it into a kind of dictionary?
In retrospect, it might have been wiser for Bush to keep his mouth shut on gay marriage, in light of the recent demise of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. Bush can still, of course, tout this as a victory in the War on Terror, but with the door slammed shut so abruptly on his domestic proposal, it will now look like a week of mixed results for him. By the way, I neither need nor want to see pictures of a dead guy in the newspaper.
D-Day has come and gone and this time, didn't hear many people talking about it; they were too preoccupied with the whole 666 thing. Do I even have to start on the cretinous, superstitious nonsense of numbers? It's the same with 13. Let me ask this: How can the number 666 mean anything intrinsically when it was the Arabs who came up with their current appearance? If 666 were truly the mark of the beast, wouldn't it appear as VI VI VI? The current numerical system wasn't even devised until the 9th Century AD and wasn't adapted by Western Europe until 300 years later. Does the symbolic nature of numbers transfer from language to language and culture to culture? I suppose anything's possible, but I have trouble getting shaken up about it.
Thank you for reading, and remember, if you don't like this blog, XIII VI VI VI on you!
posted by DM | 8:40 PM
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