In The Transcribed
Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye, “Nancy” (Betty-Jo Biolofsky) has
managed to get hold of some incriminating photos with which the villain, Rocky
Rococo, has been blackmailing her and her husband. She quickly leafs through them and then
exclaims in a shocked voice, “It’s not us!”
Then, in a calm, interested voice, she continues, “It’s an interesting
approach, but it’s not us!”
That is what came to mind when reading E. J. Dionne’s column
in The Washington Post of Thursday,
August 1, 2013, “Can Gays Save the Family?”
Dionne’s contention seemed to be that because so many same-sex couples
wanted to call their unions “marriages,” and “gay marriage” is “overwhelmingly
popular” among the younger set, this would restore traditional marriage and families
as the basic unit of society.
It’s an interesting approach, but it’s not us.
Whatever your stand on same-sex unions, you have to question
Dionne’s logic. I read through the
column more than once, and I could not figure out how including same-sex unions
in the definition of “marriage” is supposed to strengthen the traditional
understanding of marriage as a union of persons of the opposite sex as he kept
insisting.
You don’t strengthen the original meaning of anything by
expanding the definition to include disparate or contradictory elements. You only create confusion over what is meant
by the redefined term. Can you, for
example, define “capitalism”? No,
really. What does it mean?
As to the alleged salvation of the family by redefining
marriage . . . it’s directly analogous to what John Maynard Keynes claimed he
did: saving the economy by re-defining money, private property, and contract
(and anything else that took his fancy).
Even a few Keynesians have begun to doubt that the Keynesian New Deal
brought the United States out of the Great Depression of 1930-1940. The dollar went from “as good as gold” at
approximately 1/20 of an ounce of Element 79, to the near-worthless piece of
paper we have today that floats around 1/1300 of an ounce of the yellow stuff.
As for the present economic “recovery,” anyone who knows
even a little history is extremely nervous about an overblown stock market
where share values have been inflated by massive government creation of
debt-backed money, and yet unemployment remains high even after the usual
sleight-of-hand by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real inflation that includes
food and fuel is eating consumers alive, and the national debt is reaching
levels that would delight Lenin.
No, redefining critical institutions and concepts may be an
interesting approach, but it’s definitely not us — or anyone else.
#30#
