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Opinions and other musings
Feb. 24th, 2004 03:08 pmMarriage
It seems to me an obvious distinction between religious marriage and civil marriage. The former is bound by the beliefs and restrictions of a particular religion, while the latter is a bundle of legal rights and responsibilities. I see no difficulties with a religion defining marriage as 1 man + 1 woman, while the (officially secular) state defines it as two people who choose each other. In fact, I don't see how the state can keep from this definition without being discriminatory. I also don't understand how having different definitions works to undermine marriage as a whole. It seems we should celebrate people choosing a partnership, rather than keeping them from official partnering. A lot of other people have been wonderfully eloquent on this topic; unfortunately, I was not collecting links as I read.
(I think that our society isn't yet at the stage of more than two people choosing marriage. Right now the rights that come with marriage are worked out only for pairwise unions, and I think it will take a lot more involved figuring out how to deal with that than it does to 'swap out' one man and replace with a woman, or vice versa.
To me it automatically opens up interesting ideas of unbundling the rights and resposibilities between partners, as well.
An Ethiopian saying seems relevant here: "Slowly, slowly, the egg will walk on two feet.")
Nader
Why is Nader getting into the race this time? What's the point? It's unlikely he'll get much media attention for his message, rather than for the fact that he's running again, and there's no chance he can win. It would make more sense to work for reforms in the areas he's interested in in some other way, especially since he garnered so much ill will in the last campaign. I know it's unreasonable to expect most of the American electorate to remember so far back to the last presidential election, but Nader's being in the race then likely made just enough difference that we ended up with the worst president we've had in a very long time. There were other ways we could've ended up Shrub-free (NH voting the other way, for instance), but this was the most publicized.
Carribean: CA-ri-be-an, or ca-RI-be-an?
Does it make a difference whether it's being used as a noun or an adjective?
Either way, since reading Orson Scott Card's book Pastwatch about Columbus, I always think of the Caribs, driven to extinction early on; there was nowhere for them to fall back to, even unuseful places. The island problem of places with limited spaces.
Picky peeve
These days, a dash is not a dash. With the rise of the web and the resultant precision necessary to give URLs, "dash" is not sufficient. Is it a hyphen? Please say "hypen". Is it an en-dash, or an em-dash? Or perhaps a misplaced minus sign, which is usually an en-dash in plain type?
Burn
Burn is now a verb that means to destroy, or to save. Fires or CDs, take your pick.
It seems to me an obvious distinction between religious marriage and civil marriage. The former is bound by the beliefs and restrictions of a particular religion, while the latter is a bundle of legal rights and responsibilities. I see no difficulties with a religion defining marriage as 1 man + 1 woman, while the (officially secular) state defines it as two people who choose each other. In fact, I don't see how the state can keep from this definition without being discriminatory. I also don't understand how having different definitions works to undermine marriage as a whole. It seems we should celebrate people choosing a partnership, rather than keeping them from official partnering. A lot of other people have been wonderfully eloquent on this topic; unfortunately, I was not collecting links as I read.
(I think that our society isn't yet at the stage of more than two people choosing marriage. Right now the rights that come with marriage are worked out only for pairwise unions, and I think it will take a lot more involved figuring out how to deal with that than it does to 'swap out' one man and replace with a woman, or vice versa.
To me it automatically opens up interesting ideas of unbundling the rights and resposibilities between partners, as well.
An Ethiopian saying seems relevant here: "Slowly, slowly, the egg will walk on two feet.")
Nader
Why is Nader getting into the race this time? What's the point? It's unlikely he'll get much media attention for his message, rather than for the fact that he's running again, and there's no chance he can win. It would make more sense to work for reforms in the areas he's interested in in some other way, especially since he garnered so much ill will in the last campaign. I know it's unreasonable to expect most of the American electorate to remember so far back to the last presidential election, but Nader's being in the race then likely made just enough difference that we ended up with the worst president we've had in a very long time. There were other ways we could've ended up Shrub-free (NH voting the other way, for instance), but this was the most publicized.
Carribean: CA-ri-be-an, or ca-RI-be-an?
Does it make a difference whether it's being used as a noun or an adjective?
Either way, since reading Orson Scott Card's book Pastwatch about Columbus, I always think of the Caribs, driven to extinction early on; there was nowhere for them to fall back to, even unuseful places. The island problem of places with limited spaces.
Picky peeve
These days, a dash is not a dash. With the rise of the web and the resultant precision necessary to give URLs, "dash" is not sufficient. Is it a hyphen? Please say "hypen". Is it an en-dash, or an em-dash? Or perhaps a misplaced minus sign, which is usually an en-dash in plain type?
Burn
Burn is now a verb that means to destroy, or to save. Fires or CDs, take your pick.