Gayriage (II)
After my most recent posting on gayriage, plus some recent developments like the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, I tried getting this posted on Kuro5hin, but this time my article was dumped quickly. Here’s what I had written:
George Bush is threatening a unique application of the “constitutional process”—to define a word, in this case “marriage”. Or more accurately, to specify a definition which the word can’t have: the legal union of a gay couple. The Massachusetts Supreme Court, on the other hand, is of the opinion that the mere use of a different word (“civil unions”) would keep something that’s otherwise exactly the same as marriage from being constitutional in that state. John Kerry’s in the middle, saying he’s against gay marriage, but for rights for gay couples.
Clearly, this is a problem of semantics. To which let’s bring a semantic solution, in the form of an easy-to-use new term for gay marriage that’s the same, yet different: Gayriage.
This gives everybody what they need. Bush can say that marriage is a sacred institution binding a man and a woman, and if gays want to get married so badly, they’re just going to have to get gayried instead. The Massachusetts court certainly can’t hold that the difference of one consonant at the beginning of a word makes anything unconstitutional. And for Kerry a line like “In my first hundred days I will protect marriage and stand up for diversity with an executive order creating the insitution of gayriage” fits right into his Lincolnesque shtick.
Our neologism inherits the entire linguistic context of the word “marriage”, providing ready-made expressions like “gayriage counseling” and “a gayried couple” to name just two.