From Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost:
Abraham Lincoln was fond of asking, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” “Five,” his audience would invariably answer. “No,” he would politely respond, “the correct answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”Like Lincoln’s associates, many of our fellow citizens appear to fall for the notion that a change of name causes a change in essence. A prime example is the attempt to change the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions. Simply calling such relationships “gay marriages”, they believe, will actually make them “marriages.” Such reasoning, however, is as flawed as thinking that changing “tail” to “leg” changes the function of the appendage.
In order to understand whether marriage can be legitimately redefined by the government we must first understand its relation to the state. Fortunately, we only have two options to choose from. Marriage is either an institution that has an existence and autonomy apart from the state or it’s a construct that only comes into being after being created by positive law.
If marriage is autonomous and separate from the state, the common view for the past 5,000 years, then the government cannot simply define the term in any way it chooses. Because the two institutions stand apart, they can decide whether to recognize the legitimacy of the other but they cannot delineate each others boundaries. In this way, the relationship is similar to nation-states. The U.S. government, for example, can decide to “recognize” the state of Israel but it cannot redefine the country in a way that contracts its border to exclude the Gaza Strip. The U.S. either recognizes Israel as it defines itself or it rejects its legitimacy altogether.
Whether they would articulate it this way, I suspect this is what most Americans mean when they claim that the government does not have the right to redefine marriage. The fact that such an argument even needs to be made shows how degraded and confused both language and law have become.
Update: I encourage you to visit Joe’s blog and participate in the discussion. One plus: He doesn’t moderate comments.
