There's nothing wrong with a Bandage

A recent flurry in our comment section has brought back a classic phrase from discussions gone by.

To me, marriage describes a union which creates a natural family. Because it explicitly includes the reproductive relationship, it can (and should continue) to do so in order to promote marriage equality -- the equal recognition of the rights of the man, woman and child they potentially have together. They form a unit, a unit of governance and mutual dependency that deserves government recognition in order to promote those individual rights that relate to how we are created.

But ... there is another form. That is the kind that is formed by banding together, also forming mutual trusting relationships. Because of its unique nature to repair after an intact family has been broken apart, and its nature to band together, I've sometimes referred to it as "bandage" -- from way back in 2005.

Since writing that I have pondered on the word "marriage" and its meaning. A marriage is where two different entities join together to become a synergetic new entity. And if nothing else calling a same-sex union a marriage in that context is just plain cacophony. In such contemplation a ss"m" advocate recommended to me that perhaps we should change the word "marriage" to "mergerage" to better accommodate same-sex unions. Instead of unifying, a merger could mean any two people combining to a common goal, even establishing a new entity to do so.

But the way I see it, perhaps the best term comes from Camille Paglia a lesbian commentator for Salon Magazine who speculated that homosexuality could be a form of "banding together" within sexes. That would make a same-sex union a bandage, which if you look at the common usage of that wordbest describes how Westover and other conservatives wish to use marriage when contemplating same-sex "marriage". Bandage (as in banding together) would be taking these broken fragments from families and wrapping them together in a welfare package that tries to keep them together.

There is no reason to think that bandage is not rooted in human nature, or that it may even be more intrinsic to adult relationships than what we recognize in marriage. But it isn't more intrinsic to children's natural relationship with the people who combined their identity to create the child's. It isn't more intrinsic to the needs of a society to establish responsibility and devoted care for those in that newly and naturally created kinship.

Perhaps we should do both, perhaps we even can do both. But it is clear we can't do both when we dismiss the unique needs and capacity of how children are created by conflating the two as the same thing.