My unresolved issue

I ran across this post, and it made me again take a serious look about my feelings on gay marriage. I can't seem to give this issue up, at least not until I come to some personal decision.

I'm certainly not interested in limiting another human's chance at happiness. In fact, I'm not interested in almost any social limits. I've always believed that your right to swing your fist ends at my face. Do whatever the hell you want, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

And I can't find a good reason to believe that two men or two women getting married will somehow directly tarnish my marriage, my parent's marriage, or anyone else's.

Yet I can't get over the feeling that "gay marriage" would somehow cross a line. Not a moral line (although I acknowledge that many people believe this), but a nebulous, barely defined idea in my head that makes sense of words, definitions and the relationship between the two.

I believe that I have made this comparison before, but when I was taking philosophy in college, my prof helped define "a priori" with a simple equation: unmarried male = bachelor. In other words, the idea of unmarried male is inherent in the word bachelor. It does not need to be proven, it is. This stands in relation to a posteriori, which is empirically provable, but does not contain the proof in itself.

I would argue (and please tell me if I'm wrong - not anecdotally or emotionally, but with proof) that marriage = culturally recognized union of a man and a woman. Marriage is a priori the union of the opposite sexes. That a man and a woman (and not two of the same sexes) are joined is inherent in the definition of marriage.

So fucking what, you ask?

Well, that's a fair question, and hence my problem with the issue. We could all throw up our hands and call the sky the ground. We could decide that TV means cow, and cow means shelf, and shelf means wallet. Why can't we decide that marriage means any union between two people? Or, off subject, why not make it any union between any several people? Polygamy is not a new phenomenon, and has been practiced in many different cultures around the world.

In this light, my hang-up seems to be that a minority of the population is pressing for a change in definition to an ancient practice, ostensibly because of disenfranchisement. I have the same issue with transgendered people calling themselves the opposite sex. Let's be honest, surgery does not a man or a woman make. At the most fundamental biological level, they are still the sex to which they were born. You're either XX or XY, and the rest is just window dressing.

I'm white. Should I be able to declare myself hispanic or african, just because it would fulfill some personal need? Should I expect other people to go along with this fallacy, despite my near translucently pale skin? More so, should I be legally defined by whatever I feel like being?

If we fall into complete relativism, then there is no reason to speak further; there is no reason to try to describe abstract ideas and thoughts, because they become meaningless. If we are legally required to recognize whatever some people want, then we are inviting a revisionism that will completely blur the lines between any concepts that can be understood in relation to eachother.

So here comes the disclaimer. I have no problem with the idea of civil union, with all of the benefits and penalties that it entails. In fact, if we decide to scrap "marriage" altogether and make any joining a civil union, then so be it. It took my wife over 5 years to talk me into registering with the city for a piece of paper that "officially" states our union. In my mind, we were joined long, long before the day that we annually celebrate.

But now (and without my wife's permission), I declare us to be foreign diplomats, and exempt from US law. I feel disenfranchised by the fact that simply because I am not foreign-born, I can't be a political diplomat from another country.

At least, this makes as much sense to me as gay marriage.