Gabriel Arana says nothing in the public debate over marriage seems to touch on what it actually means.
Sure, whenever National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown talked about “protecting marriage” in the abstract, I knew he was protecting it from me. When the Maryland Catholic Conference said it would fight tooth and nail to “uphold the traditional definition of marriage,” I knew conference members meant I was the one corrupting the term, which right-wing publications won’t print without scare quotes — i.e., gay “marriage.” Though the debate has affected me, it has often seemed like an odd linguistic dispute over the definition of the word “marriage” — a Scrabble fight where no one has a dictionary on hand.