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Marriage

Dear?Editor,

You can saddle up a sheep, but that doesn’t make it a horse. A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that does not make them biscuits. You can fill a pool with sand, that does not make it water.

It’s the ancient, philosophical law of identity, or as Aristotle once said, “A is A.” Much later on, in a related vein of philosophical development, Ayn Rand stated that, “A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time..A thing is what it is; its characteristics constitute its identity.”

Let’s talk about marriage (after all, everyone else is). We seem to have a shortage of great thinkers like Aristotle and Rand today. Maybe they are being suppressed, you know, like the price of gold. They sure as heck are not in Washington. But anyway, before we arrive at whether or not “gay” marriage should be legal, let’s talk about marriage in general. It would seem to me that given the climate of rampant divorce and single parent families, we are already, as a culture, pretty much clueless about marriage.

As children, we often carry within us some misguided, let’s call it “childish” notion of what marriage is and, that flawed, fantastic, cognitive formation often gets carried into adulthood. We seem to see a lot of matrimonial sheep getting saddled up as horses. But often, what is ceremoniously preformed at a roadside chapel in Vegas by the world’s best Elvis impersonator, has very little to do with actual marriage. Sometimes the mess transforms into a real, legitimate marriage. Sometimes it dies on the vine and ends in divorce. Sometimes, after the train wreck, people mature and discover a real spouse and enter into (dare I say it) a real marriage. They are blessed.

Let’s stop chattering about the “definition” of marriage and start recognizing that “A is A”. Marriage has characteristics that constitute its identity. It has had them for a gazillion years. Marriage is a metaphysical reality that cannot be cheated or redefined away even by an entire army of mortal men in black robes.( I use the word “men” figuratively meaning both men and women, or even both in the same body, or sometimes one or maybe the other..you get the idea. We’ll deal with gender later).

So, until I see a sheep running the Kentucky Derby or start finding biscuits in the litter box, I will cling to my guns, Bible, and epistemological view of marriage. (I learned that big word from Aristotle)

Brett Merryman

Bellaire

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