Arnold Zwicky's Blog

William Haefeli, on the changing definition of marriage, in the May 21st New Yorker:

Following up on President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage (as here).

Note the complaint of (some) religious authorities that the government — in the form of state legislatures and the courts — is defining marriage, when marriage is (these authorities say) the province of the churches (or the people in general, by popular vote).

Meanwhile, in the same issue of the New Yorker, the lead “Talk of the Town” piece, by Margaret Talbot, begins:

One day, not long from now, it will be hard to remember what worried people so much about gay and lesbian couples committing themselves to marriage.

and goes on to look at the sad story of opposition to interracial marriage:

In 1968, the year after the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law, seventy-two per cent of Americans disapproved of marriage between whites and non-whites, and only twenty per cent approved.

So it goes.

This entry was posted on May 21, 2012 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language and the law, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.