As an Orthodox Jew, I am of course greatly dismayed by last week’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. To enshrine gay marriage as a “right” guaranteed by the Constitution is both dishonest – surely none of the Constitution’s signatories thought they were sanctioning this right – and an open rebellion against God who deems homosexual behavior an “abomination” (Vayikra 20:13).
However, throughout this decade-long debate on gay marriage, I have always been bothered by another, much more mundane matter: the distortion of language. Language is a vehicle through which humans make themselves understandable to one another. The more advanced a language, the more precise one can be in one’s communication. One of the hallmarks of a great writer is precision of language. “Clear thinking leads to clear writing,” one of my professors taught me.
For thousands of years the word “marriage” meant – by definition – a sacred or special union between a man and a woman committed to living together, usually for the purpose of building a family, the core unit of civilization. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissent, “every society known to have populated the planet” throughout “all of recorded history” accepted this definition (emphasis added). Even the ancient Greeks, who condoned homosexuality, regarded marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
The reason a man can’t “marry” a man, therefore, is the same reason why civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal cannot be black. She may want to be black and she may identify with the black community. Nonetheless, she can’t be black because, by definition, she isn’t black. What she wants is irrelevant. Facts don’t change because of one’s desires.
Take another example: Suppose a 30-year-old American feels – truly feels – like a 70 year old and applies for Medicare to alleviate his medical costs. The government will undoubtedly reject his application. It won’t reject it because it hates 30 year olds or because he is healthy (for arguments’ sake, suppose he suffers from more health problems than the average 90 year old). It will reject it because Medicare is only meant for elderly Americans, and he isn’t elderly – by definition.
Words have meaning. A table is not a chair, a man is not a woman, and white is not black. When words lose their meaning, we start living in the dystopias of George Orwell where “war is peace, slavery is freedom” and all men are created equal but some are created “more equal than others.” We start living in a Tower of Babel where, “when one asked his neighbor for an ax, the latter brought him a spade” with the result that “the former [would] smote him and split his skull” (Bereishis Rabbah 37).
The issue of gay marriage has never been about discrimination. The law barred two individuals of the same sex from marrying not because it hated homosexuals but because same-gendered partners and marriage have as little to do with each other as fish and bicycles (to misquote a famous feminist slogan). A loving relationship is not a marriage. If it were, a mother would be able to “marry” her son, a boy would be able to “marry” his pet dog, and a narcissist would be able to “marry” himself.
Liberals, though, have refused to let such an insignificant obstacle as language stop them. They’ve hijacked the word “marriage” to serve their ends and last week, in a classic illustration of the Stockholm Syndrome, the Supreme Court not only accepted the hijackers’ position, it adopted it as its own.
Age-old moral values suffered a major defeat last week. But so did language.