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Gay "marriage" and other mythical beasts

    Now that liberal wrath over the passing of California Proposition 8 is in full swing, it's about time I laid down the case for traditional marriage.

    All cultures have their founding myths--stories involving gods or cultural heroes who established rites, social norms, etc.  A healthy culture embodies these myths by realizing (real-izing) them in the lives of its members.  Social institutions are, to the traditional mind, considered valid to the degree to which they emulate the structures laid down in the founding myths.   

    Marriage, in the myths of all Indo-European cultures, occurs between a man and a woman.  In the myths of our Teutonic forebears, the first humans--created as a couple--were Ask and Embla.  To be even more precise, the first couple to have their union sanctified by a god were Ai and Edda--another male-female couple--and the first couple to celebrate an actual marriage were Karl and Snoer.

    When our forebears "converted" to Christianity, they simply replaced the old myths with some of the new ones--marriage then was an institution which emulated the union of another primordial couple, Adam and Eve.  When the redneck says, "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" he is, in a crude but effective way, stating the same concept: legitimization and enforcement of social norms by reference to the founding myths.

    The people have repeatedly voted against gay marriage in referendums across the nation for a simple reason: what Confucius called rectification of names.  To the traditionalist, the phrase "gay marriage" is nonsensical.  It makes as much sense as Noam Chomsky's "colorless green ideas:" "gay" is not an adjective which can modify the noun "marriage" in any meaningful sense, nor is marriage something which can take place between homosexuals.   To assert that "gay marriage" actually means something when to the majority of Americans it is meaningless, is a fool's errand.  To go further and demand that it be recognized by the laws of the land is pure effrontery made possible only by that arrogance which characterizes the egocentric leftist.

    The issue has nothing to do with "hate," "intolerance," "bigotry," or any other moral defect which is trotted out as the "real" reason for opposition to gay marriage.  Certainly there are individuals motivated by these things; but they are in the minority.  This is why there are many people who, while opposed to "gay marriage," are supportive of the concept of civil unions.  Civil unions have no myths to emulate; they are a state institution which allows gays to have the same rights regarding property, insurance coverage, etc.    There are those who object to civil unions on the grounds that they would be easier to obtain than marriages.  The solution is obvious: make civil unions as difficult to obtain and (more importantly) as difficult to dissolve as traditional marriages are.   

    I think everyone could be on board with that arrangement, with two exceptions: on the one hand, the radical leftist moonbat who thinks that "gay marriage" really means something and that opposition to it is simply motivated by "hate;" and on the other side, the truly intolerant individuals who really can't stand the thought that somewhere, there might be a man in bed with another man--and enjoying it.

Teutonic, Germanic, German...

    You are about to learn what these things really mean. 

    So help me, you are going to learn.

    During my brief time at WMU, it brought me great sorrow when people asked what I was studying.  I would tell them "Germanic studies," and fifty percent of the time (no, really) they would think that I had said "dramatic studies."  The other half of the time they would assume that "Germanic" meant the same as "German" (as if I had just added the -ic to amuse myself).  In response to this phenomenon, I began saying "Teutonic studies," which at least drew a "what's that?"  You'd be surprised, though, how many people had heard of the Teutonic Knights and thought that I was studying them...

    If you paid attention to my previous post on the Aryans, you will recall that Germanic--more properly called proto-Germanic--was a Centum Indo-European tongue.  It evolved into North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic.

    The word "Germanic" comes from "Germanii," a tribal designation first recorded in the work of Julius Caesar.  By the time of Tacitus, the Romans commonly used it to refer to those barbarian tribes whom they perceived as being non-Celtic.  Back then the Germanii--then as now--covered an area far more extensive than the place we call Germany.

    English speakers referred to German (not Germanic) things as "Almain" (from Alemanni, an ancient Germanic tribal confederation) until the sixteenth century; in this they probably followed the lead of the French, who still use "Allemand."  We also used the word "Dutch," which wasn't restricted to natives of Holland until the seventeenth century.

    Speaking of the Dutch, that word ultimately derives from the name of the Teutones, another ancient Germanic tribe.  It survives in German as their name for themselves, Deutsch.  It just so happened that we began using "Dutch" exclusively for Dutchmen around the same time we began using "Teutonic" to mean things Germanic--and at the same time began referring to the Deutsch as "Germans."

    So, in a nutshell, "Teutonic" and "Germanic" mean the same thing.  "German," on the other hand, refers to: a daughter language of West Germanic; the speakers of that daughter language; and the land which those speakers occupy.

    The Germanic--or Teutonic--languages living today include: English, Dutch, Frisian, High German, Low German, Afrikaans,  Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese,  Yiddish, Scots English, and Gutnish. 

Wasn't that easy?   

Aryan Blues

It's time for more rectification.

    What I'm about to say is very rarely taught in our schools, yet can be easily verified by anyone.  Many people are shocked when I give them this knowledge; some simply deny it.
I'm going to make this as quick and painless as possible.

    Between six and nine thousand years ago a people whom we call Indo-Europeans lived around the Black Sea.  The tribe began expanding; some groups moved North and West, others went South and East.  Eventually they occupied almost all of Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of Central Asia.  Having spread out so far, their mother tongue had formed several distinct dialects, which eventually became mutually incomprehensible.

    This mother tongue we call Aryan, after the Sanskrit word Aryas, the name which the Indo-Europeans on the Indian subcontinent gave to themselves.  The Indo-European people are also referred to as Aryans.  This is a cultural and linguistic term, not a racial one.

    The daughter languages of Aryan are divided into Satem and Centum tongues.  The  Centum languages were Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Anatolian, and Tocharian.  The Satem tongues were Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, Armenian, and Albanian. 

    Each of these had daughter languages as well.  The Germanic tongue, for example, begat West Germanic, East Germanic, and North Germanic.   The Italic tongue begat Osco-Umbrian and Latin.   Indo-Iranian split into Dardic, Indic, and Iranian.  And so on for the other languages.

Each of those--surprise!--also gave birth to daughter languages.

    Latin gave us: Italian, French, Romanian, Portuguese, Friulian, Catalan, Galician, Spanish, Romansch, and Provencal.

    The daughter languages of West Germanic are: English, German, Frisian, Flemish, Dutch, Yiddish, Scots English, and Afrikaans.  North Germanic became Old Norse, which begat Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Faroese.

    The Indic tongue evolved into Sanskrit, which gave us Hindi, Singhalese, Urdu, Punjabi, and a handful of others.

    The Tocharians just hung out in Western China until they were assimilated by some Turkic tribes.

    So the long and short of it is that Kurdish, Icelandic, German, Italian, Greek, and Punjabi are all Aryan tongues, and all related to English.  English, if you noticed, is a Germanic tongue.  It is not based on Greek and Latin, though it has many words from both of them.

    A more detailed breakdown of Indo-European languages is available here.  More knowledge can be had here and here.

    In the nineteenth century, certain European racists began using "Aryan" as a racial term.  There is quite a bit of diversity among Indo-Europeans; so the racists, being white, decided that Europeans were the original Aryans, while the darker Aryans of the East had obviously not kept their bloodline as "pure."  Some took it a step further and decided that since blond hair and blue eyes are most heavily concentrated in Europe, the original Aryans must have had blond hair and blue eyes.  The words "Nordic" and "Aryan" became confounded.  They even posited a Northern European origin for all of the Aryan peoples.  Oh, and of course they supposed that the Aryans were superior.

    All of which was rubbish, but that didn't stop the idea from being embraced in scientific circles; physical anthropology was in its infancy back then.   Stephen Jay Gould's book  The Mismeasure of Man gives an amusing--and infuriating--look at the "scientific" methods used to back up this foolishness.

    Racism infected politics on both sides of the Atlantic; the most virulent forms appeared in Europe.  By the end of World War II, the word "Aryan" had fallen out of favor and was replaced with "Indo-European."  When people to-day hear "Aryan," they associate it with the meaning that pre-war racists had given it.  I've heard it mis-used in this way more times than I can count, often by university students; one student I know defined "Aryans" as "blond people who want to kill everyone else."

    This has got to stop; now you know better.  Spread the word!