Deinonychus antirrhopus

I think that homosexuals would argue that slavery and Jim Crow "evolved" as well. Sometimes you need to make a clean break. If something is wrong, it is wrong, and you just deal with the consequences.

Gay marriage is not one of these instances, in my opinion. But I can understand why homosexuals make the arguments that they make. It is discrimination, but it has a higher purpose.

Marriage as a legal institution did not evolve in the sense that the concept of marriage and its other symbolic associations evolved as memes. The legal institution is static and must be deliberately changed, and the movement to alter it is indicative of the evolution of the concept to diverge from its legally entrenched form. If the state got out of marriage and out of the business of sanctioning particular human relationships, who knows what might evolve? The concept would be altered, and some meme-alleles would prosper while others died out.

``Who'' is almost always right, the exception being set phrases like ``for whom the bell tolls,'' and that's because of a conflict of register not an incorrect case. Normal would be ``Who the bell tolls for.'' It's formal to put the preposition first, ``For who the bell tolls,'' but then ``who'' is wrong because it's not formal register. That is, it does not have to do with being the object of a preposition.

On the other side, ``Whom'' is often wrong. So good rule : always use ``who.''

Thurber writes that ``whom'' is used only when a note of dignity or austerity is desired, as in ``Whom are you, anyways?''

English is not Latin, somebody discovered about a hundred years ago, though grammarians are slow to catch on.

Set aside about three months one summer and read through Quirk Greenbaum Svartvik and Leech _A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language_. It's particularly interesting if you're trying to think of how you might program a computer to deal with natural language, as one idea after another is shot to hell by this or that example. You're left with the idea that perhaps you'll revisit the matter again someday when your mind clears a little.

Who = subjective
whom = objective

Who hit whom? [For example]

It's easy to remember if you swap he/him or she/her into the sentence who = he/she (subjective case) whom = him/her (objective case). Is Rod advocating ending sentences with prepositions? For shame!

Err...Ron, rather.

``Whom'' is chiefly a source of hypercorrections, that is, putting ``whom'' in because the writer feels it must be right even though it sounds wrong : a mistake made because of fear of making a mistake. Mostly it's in subordinate clauses, eg. ``They wondered whom it could be.'' Nobody would say that, but many would write it. Just ignore the case and use ``who,'' and you'll not only be writing contemporary English, which does not retain ``whom'' at all, but you will be correct even under the old rules.

The old rules are clear enough for me, but they don't happen to govern modern English.

Shocking. I figured the topic of the post would be the most inflamatory part of the post. But instead it turns out to be the grammar.

The deal about marriage (and here the argument turns to something you could call evolution, though it is just analysis of one sort or another) is that children turn out to have been the point; and it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. You need children to get social security to work, or whatever reason you want to give.

Nobody knows exactly what a marriage is, but neither is it necessary to know. It is given certain advantages, like joint filing (source of either a ''marriage penalty'' or a ``marriage subsidy'' as in the 60s, in any progressive tax system), the ability for one spouse to speak for and commit the other (and hospital staff have to listen), and so forth. There's no particular reason that any of these can't be extended to gays, if argued for one at a time; but not by using the marriage deal. Whatever it is, leave it alone and use some other word; a lot have been proposed.

In general I would argue that most of the government involvement into marriage is based on the perpetuation of society by providing a framework for the birthing and nurturing of children. Otherwise, why limit marriage to only those who are not related as children, parents, siblings, or first cousins? Additionally, as a humorous side note, if gay marriage is made legal, will gay first cousins still be prohibited from marrying?