Ok, this pleases me just a little bit.
Yesterday was Election Day in this country; since it’s an odd-numbered year, the elections in question were limited to happenings at the state and local levels. (None here, though, or at least if there were they were secret elections that no one put up campaign signs for. This seems unlikely.) From the progressive standpoint there was good and bad news, as one might expect. Among the bad news was the decision in Texas:
…voters made their state the 19th to ban same-sex marriage…
…or at least that’s what they tried to do. Here’s what the ballot said (boldfacing mine):
The constitutional amendment providing that marriage in this state consists only of the union of one man and one woman and prohibiting this state or a political subdivision of this state from creating or recognizing any legal status identical or similar to marriage.
Take a close look at that second part: the state is prohibited from recognizing any legal status identical to marriage. “Identity” is what we in the math business call an equivalence relation; two things are equivalent when they’re the same from a certain point of view. It’s a handy sort of concept, and comes up a lot. And one of the three defining properties of an equivalence relation is this: any object X is equivalent to itself. “Reflexivity” is the fancy name, but it’s a pretty natural thing to ask. Think of equality: a number should certainly be equal to itself.
And so: Texas has just adopted a law that prevents the recognition of anything with a legal status identical to marriage.
Including marriage itself.
I’m so bringing this up in class tomorrow. And here my students were probably wondering when any of this comes up in real life…