I'm Feeling Gay - Words and Meanings and the Hijacking of Marriage

Words change meanings in the English language but what happens when meaning is hijacked?

Words change meanings all the time in the English language. For example, the word hot has several traditional meanings, one of which relates to temperature. In a modern context, saying a woman is hot can mean that she is really good looking or that you like her for her looks. With either of these definitions, the meaning of the word depends on context and one definition is rarely confused with the other.

Civil rights activists understand that words have meanings and that meanings change over time. For example, black people were referred to as Negroes in the US for several centuries. The word translates from the Portuguese term for "black." Over time, the word developed a pejorative meaning, firmly attached to black slavery in the Americas and was used in the US in a derogatory way. To get away from the pejorative meaning, civil rights activists agreed to use other terms - People of Color or African Americans for example. These terms were more neutral, without historically negative baggage attached.

Feminists have also changed the American language. In times past, writers used the pronoun "he" or "him" as gender-neutral. Feminists created a meaning of these pronouns that is not gender neutral. In order to heighten awareness to the feminists cause, these terms were ridiculed as sexist and, over time, have diminished in written English. For awhile, the pronouns "she" and "her" were substituted by cautious writers. Today, more often than not, the pronouns are replaced by the plural forms "they" and "their," much to the chagrin of English teachers everywhere. The problem is that we have no truly neuter form in the English language of a pronoun referring to a single person.

Along came the homosexual community, which took the ideas and arguments of the civil rights movement and applied them for their own political gains. The first word to go was the term homosexual. Since the term has many years of reference to an aberrant sexual practice, it would not serve as a descriptor for a group claiming civil rights. The term "gay" was originally a code word used as early as the 1920s by folks like Noel Coward to refer to homosexuality. The term in modern usage has all but lost its original meaning of "happy" or "carefree." Even in context, the term cannot be used except in reference to homosexuals. As a case in point, how many of you read the title of my article and considered any other definition for the term "gay?"

Once the term gay became widely accepted, the meaning of the word became obscured, no longer taken to imply people who practiced homosexual sex. Rather, the term came to apply to a group of people who had found that victim politics could help them gain first tolerance, then acceptance, and in the future, possibly to obtain protected status. What's happened is that the meaning of the word gay was hijacked, first from its original meaning, then to its implied meaning, now to its "protected group status" meaning. As a further complication of meaning, gays also associate with the term "LGBT" (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered). The term LGBT also removes meaning from the practices of these people, from homosexual acts or from a number of aberrant sexual practices, and creates a term that connotes victimization or oppression. Hence, the terms "gay" or "LGBT" have come to refer to a victimized group instead of to homosexual practices.

Now homosexuals want to hijack another word - marriage. The argument goes like this:

We do not want you to think of us as homosexuals, practicing forms of sexual deviancy. We are, instead, the LGBT Community, a historically downtrodden and oppressed group. Paying no attention to our individual actions but instead looking at our group, we deserve the same rights as anyone else, which includes the right to love and the right to express that love through marriage.

The word marriage, however, doesn't bend to a changing definition so easily. The word itself has a historical basis which refers to a legal agreement between a man and a woman, accepted by the state to grant legal rights to the couple and to future children, if any. Yes, the term historically refers to marriage between a man and a woman. (For references, see this article.)

Homosexual activists not only want to change the meaning of the word marriage - implying that any two people can be "married" - but they also want to change the meaning of the institution. Just as the terms "gay" or "LGBT" don't seem to imply homosexual sex, but rather have come to mean an "oppressed" group, so marriage would come to mean something different. It's not just the word at stake, it is the implication, in fact the very foundation of the institution of marriage that is at stake. The institution would no longer be the union of a man and a woman, recognized by the state to grant legal rights to the couple and to future children, if any.

Why is this a problem? Marriage would become something it isn't. Let's take a look at the term "gay" again. Hilary Duff, that bastion of fine actorhood, made a commercial talking about why people shouldn't use the term gay as a pejorative:



This commercial shows a big, two-faced problem. The problem is that homosexuals hijacked the word "gay" for themselves, created a meaning disassociated with homosexual practices, then got bent out of shape when the term was hijacked by teens to mean something else. "Hey!" the homosexuals say. "That's our word. You can't use that word for your own definition and meaning! Using that term to mean "bad" is demeaning to gays!"

Let's see, where have we heard that before? Oh yes, that's exactly what homosexuals are trying to do with the term marriage. However, when people complained about the hijacking of the term marriage, homosexuals, instead of feeling bad about using a term that doesn't apply to them, point at their "protected" status, pull out their hair, rend their clothes, sit in sackcloth and ashes, crying about how oppressed they are, how unfairly others are treating them, how their "civil rights" have been stolen.

This is the two-faced ideology of modern liberalism. You can stick it to the other person, but if the person fights back, you hide behind a wall of accusations, false assumptions, "civil rights," or even behind a wall of meaningless words. As one, final example of hijacked meaning, we remember the infamous quote from former president Bill Clinton in his 1998 grand jury testimony: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."