"When did you stop beating your wife?" That's, of course, a trick question that will get you into trouble no matter how you answer. The whole gay marriage legal issue is even more a conundrum of confusion.
Think carefully about the recent federal court ruling that Kentucky's marriage law, upholding marriage as between a man and a woman, violates the U. S. constitution's 14th amendment.
Laws can't discriminate against any particular class of people, the federal judge ruled according to the constitution. Yes, homosexuals are a class of people. Hard to deny that. But it's also been hard to deny another stubborn reality; at least it remains incredibly hard for many, if not most, Kentuckians. The long historical definition of "marriage" as only between a man and a woman is the one that has fundamentally shaped the civic culture of Kentuckians and other Americans well before any of us were born. Many, if not most of us, just don't have the mental categories to perceive "marriage" any other way. At least we can conceive that what homosexuals are doing can be legitimately defined as "civil union" in a public sense, or perhaps furthermore as "loving commitment" in a personal sense. But "gay marriage," more than merely a legal struggle, forces us to preserve any sane trajectory of "logic" itself. More than ever before, words mean everything.
History also teaches us something else. Revolutions usually need confusing chaos from which the revolution's new categorical thinking and culture can arise. So now, you are either trying to sort out and assess the new logic of "gay marriage," or you are leaving the thinking to others. If you're among the latter, this is actually no longer a revolution for you. It might as well be life as you'll always know it from this point forward. What about the new normal?
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