Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Blanche congratulates our progressive friends in Canada, where same-sex marriage has recently become legal for the entire nation. They join Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain as the countries with full marriage rights for gays and lesbians. (Same-sex marriage had been legal in many Canadian provinces due to court decisions that began in 2003, but the recently-passed legislation extends this right to the whole country.)

Besides the Fab Four just mentioned, there are also a large number of countries that offer a status like civil union (often called "registered partnership"): Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Members of registered same-sex unions in these countries get most of the responsibilities and privileges of marriage, with occasional exceptions regarding adoption and immigration.

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Many fatuous arguments have been made against same-sex marriage, most of them having to do with the supposed horrible effects on heterosexuals. In one common line of argument, it is said that straight people will no longer get married if the institution is so debased that even gay people can enter into it. (A defender of Jim Crow might have analogously argued that no white person would ever cast a ballot again if suffrage were polluted by allowing blacks to vote.) Nearly all such arguments are absurd at face-value, and we have little difficulty in seeing through them.

But one sort of faulty argument comes from linguistic authority, and otherwise reasonable people are occasionally persuaded by it. According to this argument, the word marriage actually means "the union of a man and a woman," and the government is powerless to change the meaning of a word. It seems evident that the government could not pass legislation that made 13 an even number or legislation that declared female siblings to be brothers.

An argument of this sort was made by the Canadian philosopher Robert Stainton, who argued in an affidavit to the Supreme Court of Ontario that marriage necessarily refers to opposite-sex couples. Luckily, his argument did not prevail. Blanche's dear friend Adčle Mercier, a philosopher at Queens University in Ontario, filed an opposing affidavit (available at http://www.ub.es/grc_logos/people/amercier/proof3.htm) which applies a philosophical ginsu knife to Stainton's reasoning.

To a philosopher of language, the difference between the meaning of a word and its reference is an important one. One could spend a lifetime clarifying the intuitions behind these concepts, but for our discussion we can say that the reference is the thing to which the word applies in the world. The meaning is something like the idea expressed by the word. (So some words, like "Unicorn" or "the current king of France" have meanings, but don't refer to anything in the world.)

Mercier points out that words change their reference all the time. Before 1897, all lawyers in Canada were male. But the word "lawyer" did not mean "a male who is licensed to give legal advice to clients and to represent them in court." It was merely the case that in Canada the group to which lawyer referred was composed entirely of males prior to that date. When Clara Brett Martin was admitted to the bar in 1897, the meaning of the word lawyer did not mysteriously change its meaning. It only referred to a larger variety of people than was previously the case.

In a similar vein, marriage does not mean "the union of a man and a woman." It has merely referred to this group until recently. Blanche would argue that the meaning of marriage in Western Europe and North America is (approximately) "the social and legal recognition of a union between two people, typically accompanied by coresidence and a sexual relationship between the couple." (Typical is included in this definition because these are the usual accompaniments of marriage, but coresidence and sex can be absent.) Marriage used to refer only to heterosexual couples because there was no legal mechanism for same-sex couples to gain recognition for their relationships until a few years ago.

By changing the law to allow same-sex marriage, the courageous nation of Canada did not commit a linguistic or philosophical error. Instead, Canada recognized that changing the law to remove heterosexual privilege in marriage was necessary for a nation committed to respect for the equal rights of all its citizens.