Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

-A. Einstein

Yeah, yeah. And the government is best that governs least so long as it attends to fundamental social needs while preventing anarchy. Also your car should have just enough safety features to keep you alive, but not so many as to make driving unreasonable. Ice cream sundaes should come in sizes that are large enough to let you savor their deliciousness, but not so big as to give you a stomachache. And so forth. First appearances to the contrary, the Einstein quote and its cousins are compelling not because they are helpful instructions on how best to go merrily Goldilocksing your way through life. Instead they are compelling because they are just this side of being vacuous truisms. “Just enough” is barely less than “too much” by definition. Their only real content lies in the unsupported assertion that such a sweet spot exists.

List("to be or", "not to", "be").par.flatMap(_.split("""\s+""")).
    foldLeft(Map[String, Int]())((m,s) => m + (s -> (m.getOrElse(s, 0)+1)))
// produces Map(to -> 2, be -> 2, or -> 1, not -> 1)

Okay so I used “flatMap” instead of “map” and “foldLeft” instead of “reduce”, but you get the idea. Note the par keyword, which invokes Scala’s parallel collections framework, transparently parallelizing the map step. Who needs a compute cluster when you’ve got the Scala REPL?

This is just a little stunt, of course, but if you’re serious about working with MapReduce and Scala the ScalaHadoop project looks like a good place to start.

That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it.
–Ludwig Wittgenstein

Here is Frank Sinatra performing Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” on his 1957 album A Swingin’ Affair.

Here is a solo guitar version of “Night and Day” I recorded a couple years ago.

Click to hear the recording, which was played on a guitar not unlike the one pictured here.

Here is a picture of the LP on which the Sinatra version of “Night and Day” appears.

Of course you can’t hear music by looking at a picture, but you could imagine putting this record on a turntable and hearing the same song as above. Specifically what would happen is a stylus would travel over a rotating sheet of vinyl. Variations in the height of the vinyl would be translated into vertical movements of the stylus, which would in turn be translated into an electrical signal that, when amplified and played through speakers, would produce a song identical to the first link above, give or take a few pops and skips. It would not be identical to my version, but it would nevertheless be the same song.

Here is the sheet music to “Night and Day” courtesy of Wikifonia, the web’s best source of free lead sheets.

This sheet music is the written form of both songs above because the markings on the page correspond to its notes. Well, not exactly. It’s written in the key of G, while both of the songs are played in D. It also doesn’t annotate the horn and bass lines of the Sinatra version, and it certainly doesn’t annotate the improvised riffs in my version of the song, but by longstanding convention you are considered to be playing a lead sheet so long as you stick more or less to the chord progression and at some point produce a recognizable version of the melody.

Of course I’m speaking loosely when I refer to the notes “on the page” because there is no page. There is an actual sheet of paper printed off from this very site sitting in a ring binder in my house, but you wouldn’t know that because you’re looking at an image on this website. Which strictly speaking is an image on some kind of screen in front of you. Nevertheless we’d say these are the same piece of sheet music, though they’re different from the paper one in my ring binder (it’s in the key of D) and also presumably different from whatever Sinatra’s session musicians played off of a little over fifty years ago.

When I talk about the songs above I of course don’t mean that a song is physically “above” the current line of text–that’s just a way of telling you how to go find the song on this page. The song itself is at the other end of the hyperlink. You click on the hyperlink, sending a request to a computer to fetch the song for you, which forwards the request to another computer and so on and so forth. Eventually the file containing the song is retrieved and sent back to you. There may be any number of intermediate copies of the song scattered among computers all over the world expediting the process of creating another copy which exists on your local machine. The song also temporarily exists as bursts of network packets intermingled with a mindbending number of other packets, where each packet is just a list of numbers which is in turn just a sequence of voltage variations passing down a piece of copper or fiber-optic cable. Unless we are network engineers, however, we conceive of these intermediary copies as a technicality, an artifact of the delivery system. (This is by analogy with a written note, which certainly does not become a series of identical notes when it is passed from hand to hand.)

The file containing the song actually resides in a data center, which is some giant humming room located in an unremarkable looking industrial park that, for all the amazing computational power it houses is primarily a masterpiece of the art of air conditioning. Either of the versions of “Night and Day” you just listened to exists on harddrives on some set of the servers in a room that looks something like this.

Were it necessary I suppose you could go to the data center and find a machine that contained the file and extract its harddrive. With the help of a hardware specialist you could even determine the approximate location on which the information is stored, either as a magnetic irregularities on a spinning drum or a set of transistors in a particular state. It would be possible to tap a small plastic box in two separate places with the head of a pin and correctly say that the song is here but not here, though outside of a harddrive manufacturing plant it’s not clear why you’d ever do such a thing. The song isn’t really a physical entity–it just happens to correspond to many physical entities of many disparate types.

And I’ve only scratched the surface of the correspondences. The song is also stored on cassette tapes, iPods, laptops, scratchy old 78s, 8 tracks, and Diamond Rios gathering dust in the bottoms of desk drawers. Oldies radio stations are broadcasting it in the form of radio waves all across the globe. At this moment the members of a pickup band are at a café, street corner, or living room somewhere, at a loss for what to play next until one of them says, “What about ‘Night and Day’?” The breath of a woman waiting at a bus stop in Oslo on her way to a graveyard shift at a 24-hour grocery store emerges in visible rhythmic puffs as she whistles “Night and Day” even though she doesn’t know the name of the song, or the lyrics, and in fact doesn’t even realize she’s whistling.

Why this orgy of isomorphism? Two reasons: communication and memory. If no one plays “Night and Day” no one will hear it, and if the song is never written down or recorded it will eventually be forgotten. But even memory provides no exit from the cycle of representation. Close your eyes and remember the song that you just heard a minute ago. That you can means there is now something about the configuration of your brain that bears a resemblance to radio waves and electrical variation in a length of fiber-optic cable and markings on a score and pressure fronts of air in the vicinity of a cabaret singer and once upon a time Cole Porter’s brain and his alone. The song is, we say, now part of you.

I’m purposefully making this all sound a bit mystical, but really there is no magic here. Unifying disparate phenomena under a single name is just something us humans do. And in this case the details of the mapping between any pair of phenomena is usually straightforward–there are plenty of accompanists who can turn the printed notes of a score into the correct key presses on a piano, plenty of audio engineers who understand the relationship between microphone diaphragm deflection and voltage levels in exhaustive detail. It’s just that there are so many mappings between so staggeringly many disparate kinds of things that it’s difficult to conceive of the proper level of abstraction to capture them all and is therefore tempting to say that the ability to be put into correspondence with each other is just what “Night and Day” is.

The above is mostly me doing an impersonation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of language from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which very roughly is the claim that a thought can represent reality by virtue of bearing a structural relationship to it. I say impersonation because I don’t fully understand the theory and because I can see where I am diverging from points I do understand, e.g. my concern with the physical groundings of these representations runs contrary to Wittgenstein’s insistence that the world is comprised of “facts” instead of “objects”. But a significant part of the Tractatus does hinge on the idea of structural similarity, and this is where there can be mutual illumination between the writings of a World War One era philosopher and the current explosion of information technology.

The story is that Wittgenstein’s inspiration came from a courtroom model of a traffic accident recreated on a table-top using toy cars. This is an isomorphism, sure, but I’ve always found it an unsatisfying example because the mapping is a little too clear. In both the real world and the courtroom we’re observing a spatial relationship between cars; it’s just in the latter case the cars are a lot smaller. There must be more to the Picture Theory than a shrink ray. The concept of a function from mathematics is closer to the mark, but it’s difficult to talk about functions without everyone too narrowly picturing numerical relationships drawn on graph paper. Likewise anyone who has given any thought to language, or musical scores, or photographs has wrestled with the idea of representation, but usually still on a very recondite philosophical level.

Then along came computers. The collapse of various forms of information into a single physical medium is a practical business we’ve all been witnessing in our daily lives. We ourselves have replaced our cassettes with CDs with an iTunes library and felt like we’ve done nothing, or contemplated how the purchase of a Kindle might allow us to recapture shelf space for knick-knacks. Photo developer kiosks and newspapers really are going out of business. Our daily life has given us a feel for the malleability of information, and about a century ago Wittgenstein gave it a name.

You talk to yourself and don’t even realize it.

You have a tendency to drag things out but maybe that’s not always such a bad thing.

You’re the kind of person who sometimes wears a pair of old boxer shorts with holes in them and nothing else.

Hey there, Mr. Wonderful, eat all the crackers you want!

You will die.

At any given time you have a pretty good idea where in the building the night watchman will be. Between midnight and 1:00 am he’ll be at the desk. At 1:05 am he’ll be heading down the main hallway, starting his first patrol. You can guess almost to the minute when he’ll be on the third floor, or walking down the back stairs, or checking the door to the loading dock, and so forth. Of course these are just educated guesses–only the night watchman actually knows because he’s the only person in the building. Maybe some times instead of being at his desk he’s in the bathroom, or making himself a cup of coffee in the kitchenette down the hall. Maybe one night he lingers an unusually long time in a sixth floor conference room, mesmerized by a trickle of headlights on the highway below. In general though the watchman’s location is very predictable. This is a boring job.

You can imagine a video screen displaying the watchman’s probable locations as colors projected onto a floor plan of the building. Bight red represents where he is most likely to be, grading through orange and yellow for possible locations, heading down to cooler blues to represent unlikely locations, and finally becoming transparent for regions of the building where the night watchman almost certainly is not. There is a digital clock at the bottom of the screen that runs as you view an animation of the watchman’s whereabouts throughout the night. Between midnight and 1:00 am there is a tight red blob around the front desk. During his rounds the color spreads throughout the building, a red ball centered around where he’s likely to be, with a penumbra of orange that trails off into blue since the watchman doesn’t do exactly the same thing night after night. It is like watching a multicolored jellyfish ooze its way through the hallways and up the staircases, its edges flickering and luminescent. Even if you knew that this depiction represented a fairly abstract idea about probabilities, it would be easy to get into the habit of thinking that the office building was actually being guarded by an oozing shimmering jellyfish.

In order to make sure the night watchman is actually doing his rounds there are sensor boxes scattered throughout the building. He waves a keycard across one and it registers that he was there at a particular instant, allowing us to track his progress. He is next to the third floor women’s room at exactly 3:07 am, on the fourth floor stair landing at 3:25 am, outside the fifth floor conference room at 4:04 am and so forth. Now imagine how this would appear on our screen. We presume the watchman starts his rounds at 1:00 am, so we’d see the tight red ball detach itself from the front desk, spread out a bit, and begin oozing towards the stairs. It drifts like this for a while, its nucleus moving with purpose, but with blurred edges sniffing about, reflecting the fact that we can’t know exactly where the guy is. Then the watchman comes to the first sensor box and swipes his keycard. On the screen the diffuse blob instantly collapses into a single red dot right on top of the first sensor box because we know that’s where the night watchman is at that moment. Now as time continues to unfold, he will presumably resume his rounds and uncertainty will insinuate itself again. The single red point will swell back into an orangish haze of possibility, oozing its way through the building until the watchman reaches the next sensor box and swipes his card, at which point it will again collapse to a red dot.

If you only ever saw the screen this all might seem exceedingly odd. Not only is the office building being guarded by a shimmering jellyfish, but from time to time that jellyfish collapses to a single point, then reinflates and resumes its oozing. What’s more it certainly can’t be the electronic mechanism of the sensor box that causes the watchman to abruptly change his shape. No, it seems as if it’s our knowledge of the watchman’s location causes his dramatic collapse. The mere act of observing a thing changes it. What could be the deep forces at play here? Is it synchronicity? Are we tapping into the universal mind? Certainly we are at some boundary where science must cede authority to a mystical acknowledgement of how powerful and amazing our personal consciousness is!

There is nothing of the sort. There is just a night watchman. For a while we know where he is, and then we don’t.

One of us (a few years older, though looking back on it still quite young) disagreed. We were being narrow-minded, he said. The belief that creativity was the key to a happy life was peculiar to the sorts of people who attend big-name colleges. In fact, for most people on Earth the idea that everyone should aspire to be some kind of artist sounds as weird as the idea that everyone should aspire to be some kind of insurance salesman. Think of a 19th century peasant in Italy, he said. For that guy satisfaction came from providing food for his family and going to church. Personal creativity didn’t enter into it.

But, we objected, wasn’t the 19th century Italian peasant really a kind of artist? His medium was the soil, and his ability to grow food from seed was a creative act in the same way as transforming a block of marble into a statue. Sure it might seem like something else was going on, but underneath it all that guy had the same aspirations we did.

For some deeply religious people, the idea of decency is so wrapped up with the idea of a personal God that they find it difficult to speak about it otherwise. This can cause friction when they encounter secularists like myself. Each senses that the other shares the same values, but has such radically different ways of expressing them that communication becomes strained. Sometimes the religious person will try and work around this by suggesting that to recognize the decency of others and the goodness of the world is to experience God’s love, and therefore the secularist is actually religious in every way that matters, they just don’t realize it. Even if this is offered in a spirit of generosity it is an exasperating thing to hear. No, the secularist thinks, I’m not a child. I know what I believe, and it is different from what you believe.

That the world is populated by people who are different from us is scary. That the things dearest to our hearts may not be dear to them is so scary that it becomes hard to see. But life is more interesting when we see it anyway.

Yeah but lock your doors when you drive through, because those people were terrifying. See them staring dead-eyed out of daguerrotypes because smiling was apparently invented in 1921. The most generous, moral and open-minded among them was still a Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard maundering on about women’s naturally childlike intellect while harpooning a whale. Hoop skirts, sexual repression, and hideous facial hair. But don’t you dare laugh, because that dork with the fussy string tie and the waxed moustache would gut you with a Bowie knife as soon as look at you. Violence was an omnipresent fact of life. The British fought the French fought the Dutch fought the Austrians for reasons that are now incomprehensible. If you were a young man you aspired to be a military officer, which meant you donned a giant plumed hat and tried to give your fellow Stratego characters gangreen with a musket.

Here in the United States we had slavery and the Indian Wars. Think Balkan ethnic cleansing from the 1990s, except happening across an entire contient. Conditions in much of the country were so primitive that there was no rule of law. People banded together in small paranoid groups and what order there was was maintained by men with pistols following brutal codes of honor. It’s the same situation that obtains in gang-ridden public housing projects today, but because back then the guns were being carried by white people the whole business is looked on with an inexplicable sense of nostalgia. People shivered in railroad cars, imagining what horrors awaited them in Denver. In crude clapboard brothels situated on the outskirts of flyblown frontier towns burly miners were serviced by prostitutes who looked like burly miners.

–I’m tired. I’m sick. I can’t remember the last time I had a hot shower or used a bathroom that was anything more than an excrement-filled ditch. Every person around me is a virulent racist, a religious fanatic, or both, and they reek. This is the worst camping trip ever. I want to go home.
–Home? You are home.

And yet, amidst all this darkness, the 19^th century is the era in which mathematics finally came together. Euler’s inspired insights coalesced into Riemann’s formal rigor. Maxwell captured the essential facts of electromagnetism in four vector calculus equations whose intricacy still delights. Epsilon-delta proofs moved Zeno’s two thousand year old paradoxes into the Solved column. Georg Cantor tamed infinity. This was no steady accumulation of knowledge or localized flurry of fresco-painting. No, it was a human project that had been brewing continuously since the days of classical Greece coming into sudden and breathtaking fruition. And it was pulled off by a handful of those same prim, bewhiskered, European zombies that in every other way inspire nothing but horror.

For a large class of cases–though not for all–in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in language.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §43

This feels right, but what does it mean? “Use in language” here and elsewhere in Philosophical Investigations clearly refers to something expansive. A word’s meaning is not its dictionary definition (the layman’s view) or some bit of set-theoretic formalism (the professional semanticist’s view). These are both just mappings of language onto other language. “Use” seems to touch on something extra-linguistic, but what?–speaker mental states, rules of social deportment, a catalogue of every meaningful utterance of a given word by anyone who can be said to know it? Wittgenstein tries¹ to throw light on the subject by giving examples of simple language games–e.g. a construction worker pidgin that consists solely of words like “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, “beam” and presumably all the pointing and facial expressions one can muster. This is helpful to a point, but also too simple. In a four-word language where the only topic is fetching and the only paralinguistic information is an expression of either pleasure and displeasure, a word’s “use” is not much more complicated than its dictionary definition. Make your world too small and it crystalizes back into a formalism.

Let’s make things more complicated in the hopes of gaining traction. Instead of a word, consider the meaning of a phrase. And not just any phrase, but a metaphor. A canonical example of a metaphor would be something like “John is a firecracker”.

This is a clean room sentence, simpler than the metaphors that infuse our daily speech without us even realizing it², but serves to illustrate a point. The literal meaning is what you would come up with if you looked up each word in a dictionary then chained the definitions together. You could imagine an ESL student doing exactly this and then being confused until you explained to them that what the phrase really means is that John has an exuberant personality.³  By explaining how the expression is used, you have gotten to the heart of the matter.

The Wittgenstein quote above may be easier to grasp then if, instead of equating “meaning” and “use”, we we throw the latter into relief by distinguishing between them. If this helps, it helps, but we do nothing substantive by asserting that “meaning” = “literal meaning” and “use” = “metaphorical meaning”. We are just shuffling terms around in the hopes that something clicks. To this end, the field of linguistics provides a bit more helpful jargon. Instead of presenting literal/metaphorical meaning as an unanalyzed dichotomy, linguists say that the former arises when we treat the only the individual words as being present “in the lexicon” and arrive at the small explosive device meaning “compositionally”. The metaphor, on the other hand, arises when the schemata “X is a firecracker = X has an exuberant personality” is retrieved from the lexicon en bloc.⁴ Linguists also often reserve the term “meaning” for literal meaning, and put usage/social function/aesthetics/metaphor under the heading of “pragmatics”, which is often just a fancy way of saying “the stuff we don’t know how to explain”, but it’s nice to have a word for that too.

Wittgenstein claims an equivalence between two things–meaning and use–so in order to move beyond mere nomenclature we’re going to have to draw a table with more than two entries. The textbook metaphor above doesn’t fit the bill, but one captured in the wild just might. Recently I proposed an analysis of the expression “That’s how we roll”, as in “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us–that’s how we roll”. The literal meaning of the phrase has something to do with things rolling, but the phrase is used to convey a particular variety of resolve. However, to focus on just literal and metaphoric meanings misses part of what is going on here. There is at least a third level, which I present like so.

I’m fudging the right-hand column because the Metaphorical Meaning and Use apply to the entire phrase while the Literal Meaning is just of the verb “roll”. I am also not proposing any sort of general three-tired theory of semantics. Instead I am making the narrow claim that for this expression it is possible to identify two kinds of non-literal connections: the first between wheels and wheeled vehicles, and the second between wheeled vehicles and steely resolve. Since the first of these is a synecdoche (rolling wheels are a stand-in for the vehicle’s entire motion) I call it metaphorical, but I’m not particularly attached to that bit of nomenclature either. What I do claim is that the Use here is distinct from both the Literal and Metaphorical meanings, and furthermore that it is the essence of the phrase. In this way “That’s how we roll” can serve as an easily-grasped example of what it means to say that meaning is use.

Wittgenstein compares words to tools. The relationship between tools and their use is easy to grasp. A hammer is fundamentally a thing that pounds in nails; a wrench is fundamentally a thing that loosens and tightens bolts, and so forth. Tools also have component parts. Hammers have heads and peens. Screwdrivers have handles and blades. We recognize these parts, may even make taxonomies of them, or divide tools into bladed and non-bladed, but there’s no danger of confusing a tool’s part with its use. In language the constituent parts of expressions’ meanings are their form, syntax, literal and metaphorical meanings and so forth. These are also distinct from use, but the distinction is harder to see.

¹Hermeneutic corollary to my standing caveat: when I claim that Wittgenstein says such-and-such I really do believe I know what he’s getting at. However, Wittgenstein–in both the gnomic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the deceptively plain-spoken Philosophical Investigations–is often difficult to understand, so strictly speaking I should hedge on this claim, but I won’t actually write the hedging words because they would get tiresome to read, and anyway I don’t in the end care what Wittgenstein thought. What is actually happening in these posts is that I come up with an idea on my own, and only as I am working through it do I realize that it sounds like something I read in Philosophical Investigations. So in the interest of maximal modesty let me propose the following ground rule: all correct ideas here are Wittgenstein’s, and all errors are my own.

²For example, the metaphor-as-tea image evoked by “infuse”.

³At which point the ESL student will say, “Oh I see: firecracker.” Metaphors are not hard to understand. What’s difficult for ESL students is our damn prepositions. Is the car “out” of gas or “under” gas? Why does one lie “in” bed instead of “over” it? They’ll try to puzzle things out and inevitably pick the wrong word. In this instance you have to tell them to shut off their finely-attuned human sense for metaphor and just memorize by rote.

⁴See, for example, Ray Jackendoff’s Foundations of Language for a discussion of these more complex lexical entries. Syntactic theories such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar have developed quite lovely formalisms for expressing this variable notion of compositionally in a precise way.

I stopped blogging about gay marriage a while ago because I had become tiresome on the subject. I was just reiterating the standard arguments in favor so what’s the point? I figure the current Supreme Court docket provides me a last ditch opportunity to say something original on the subject and then shut up about it forever.

The most admirable aspect of conservative political philosophy is its preference for gradual organic change to top-down fiddling by technocrats. By these standards, the argument that a change in the legal definition of marriage would cause the existing social institution to come tumbling down is profoundly unconservative. If traditional marriage is so frail that it requires constant ministration from statehouse bureaucrats to keep it alive then the market has clearly spoken, and it should be allowed to die.

Homophobia is not racism. Ethnic and racial groups perpetuate themselves by means of childbirth. Heterosexual family structure is an inextricable part of the whole business. Anyone can feel hostility towards the random black stranger walking down the street. In order to be a racist and not merely a jerk you have to also feel hostility to their ancestors and children, sight unseen. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is not passed from parents to children. It is a condition sprinkled at random across ethnic, class, and geographic lines. This is good news because family structures correlate with lots of other socioeconomic factors, while random things correlate, by definition, with nothing. If you waved a magic wand that instantly and forever erased racism from the hearts of all Americans, a black underclass would persist in this country for economic reasons alone, and its recognizably black social characteristics would continue to be disparaged simply because they were recognizable. (How do I know this? Ask yourself, my fellow white people, how many times you have referred to one of our beautiful brothers and sisters as a redneck or white trash and really meant it.) Wave a different magic wand that abolishes homophobia and that’s it. There are no structural conditions to keep the hostility on life support. It would simply disappear.

One disaster scenario promulgated by anti-gay-marriage proponents is that a Supreme Court overturn of Proposition 8 and DOMA would be a homosexual Roe v. Wade, a ruling handed down from on high that a significant portion of the American populace abhorred, causing the underlying conflict to drag out for generations. I think this is mostly an attempt to spread generalized uncertainty and doubt, along with invocation of fighting words about abortion, but a part of me shares this fear. The unelected status of the Supreme Court was an excellent design decision on the part of the Founders¹, but a resolution of a contentious issue in the judicial branch can cause it to become frozen in amber. This is undesirable for gay rights advocates, whose most fool-proof strategy is to remain visible and wait for everyone over the age of sixty to die. We win by running out the clock, so it’s in our interests to keep the clock running.

I was pleased when Rand Paul came out in favor of gender-neutral marriage laws. The fact that he is a member of a political party I vote against with distressing regularity and was presumably engaged in some elaborate triangulation within the American right only makes me happier. When an opponent starts advocating your views in the service of their ends you know you’re winning the negotiation.

Finally, there’s a good chance that things will break the liberal way, that gay marriage in America will continue to accumulate legal victories and social acceptance, and that in a decade’s time it will be the norm in all fifty states and people will wonder what the fuss was all about. This would be a wonderful thing, but it wouldn’t change the fact that state-administered marriage is an antiquated, intrusive, and discriminatory institution. It is the result of a deal worked out over the past couple centuries in which modern secular states agreed to take on the church’s traditional job of micromanaging human sexuality to no end beyond showing everyone who is boss. The church did this with threats of hell in the afterlife and social banishment here on Earth. The state prefers to erect a cocoon of economic and legal incentives, each individual one of which is easily ignored, but God help you if a life partner dies intestate or ends up on a ventilator and you lack the paperwork to prove that the two of have been conducting your sex lives in the appropriate manner. (One positive result of Proposition 8 is that its proponents have had to retreat from appeals to tradition, social stability, and The Children, and admit that for them it really is about government regulation of coitus.) Legalizing gay marriage would extend an arbitrary and exclusionary set of rights to a broader group of people, while still discriminating against elderly platonic friends who would like to designate each other as their primary decision maker, people who prefer to organize childrearing along something other than two-parent “nuclear” lines², those who quite reasonably resent being bullied into getting a thumbs up on their most intimate relationship from a court clerk, and single people. Northern European countries where long-term cohabitation has been replacing legal marriage among couples–including heterosexual, monogamous, child-rearing ones–have the right idea, not us. If it hadn’t proved such an indignity for my same-sex friends, I would have been in favor of reserving the word “marriage” for opposite-sex couples (preferably those married in a church), to emphasize how backwards the idea is, and encourage society to replace it with better arrangements while legal marriage itself withered away.

¹And by the way, my fellow red-equals-sign partisans, it’s no use posting Facebook warnings to Alito, Thomas et al. about how closely you’re watching them. It’s their job not to care.

²In other words, traditional families.