Everyone knows that socons aren’t really against gay marriage – they’re against gayness in general. But since the the gay marriage debate is imminently over in Canada, lets get in a parting shot by pretending that there is some tiny minority of heteronormals whose best friends are gay but genuinely believe that slight adjustments to the marriage ceremony will threaten the fabric of society – “tradnubials”, say.

The incoherence of the tradnubial position is that civil marriages are a vastly more significant change to the ceremony. Because of the existence of civil ceremonies, it is coherent to advise the government to get out of the marriage ‘business’ altogether: civil unions for everyone is all the government really recognises from a legal sense already. Besides the slippery slopes, tradnubials – and perhaps everyone else – should be against civil ceremonies because they do nothing more than create an increasingly toothless legal fiction. It takes a ceremony* and its village of witnesses to create a powerful social abstraction, which the rest of society will enforce (you’re supposed to feel guilty when you sleep with someone who’s married).

So let everyone get married, but force them to do it in the secular equivalent of a church (because we’re banning the churches in another post); and if anyone deserves to be lynched, it’s the marriage commissioners.

* The core of the ceremony is the quintessential illocutionary (done by saying) act, “I pronounce you…”, which demonstrates that language creates reality.