The gay marriage issue is on its way through the courts, perhaps all the way to the supreme court. It's a contentious issue, and one that seems to rest primarily on semantics.
In California we have marriage, and we have domestic partnerships, which convey the material benefits of marriage, but deny the cultural and emotional benefits. So, it's the word "marriage" that is the sticking point.
This is not surprising, as humans live in a semantic world. The Old Testament, one of the foundational documents of western culture, starts out with God naming things. What we call something usually determines how we think about it.
With that in mind, and knowing there are two conflicting opinions on gay marriage, I can't help thinking about the basic elements of a sentence, that unit of human thought. A sentence is divided into a subject and a predicate: what it is and what it does. The more I thought about it, the more I suspect that there are subject people and predicate people.
Take this sentence: Marriage is a formal union between two people who love each other.
Subject people stop at the word marriage and apply their definition before reading on. Predicate people don't pay much attention to the subject, but look at the rest of the sentence and say, "People loving each other; union; sounds OK to me."
As a predicate person, I care mostly about the process. You can scratch "marriage" and rename it, "purple unicorn breath," and it would be the same to me. Not so for others, so the debate rages on.
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