Marriage: What’s in a Definition?

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Ricochet: Marriage: What’s in a Definition?

Merina Smith March 20, 2015 at 8:43 am

 

When my youngest child was in kindergarten, we were talking with him one day about what he’d learned at school. We soon realized that he had misunderstood his teacher when she taught the class about coin values. When we told him that his teacher had given the class incorrect information, he became very upset. He instinctively understood that if he incorrectly defined the values of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters, he could never hope to understand the larger monetary system. He had to rely on the basics he was learning in kindergarten to be his building blocks for all the other, more complicated things he would learn in the future.

 

The definition of marriage is a basic understanding that permeates all of society and the way we define any number of other words. When understood as a permanent sexual union of a man and woman and any children born to them, it keeps in place many crucial concepts that allow humans to flourish.

 

On the most basic level, it assumes two genders–male and female–with different names for each within marriage, husband and wife