I think I must be missing something. Here's the text of the advisory opinion of the Massachusets Supreme Judicial Court clarifying their Goodridge decision. (To wit: "No, really. We meant marriage. Seriously.") It's immediately followed by Justice Martha Sosman's dissent, which includes this very confusing footnote, arguing that the distinction between a civil marriage and a civil union is merely semantic and, consequently, unimportant:
The insignificance of according a different name to the same thing has long been recognized:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title."
W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II.
Moreover -- I'm also no literary critic -- it seems to me that Justice Sosman is rather totally missing the point of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's soliloquy is ironic; if it weren't for the names Montague and Capulet, the play would have ended with Romeo and Juliet married and raising their canonical 2.3 kinds in Schenectady. It's only because of Romeo's name, and all the family crap that it implies, that everyone ends up all pathetic and dead at the end of Act 5.
But I don't know. Maybe Sosman's dissent is more than it appears. I'd like to imagine that she's a secret gay rights activist, writing this particularly weak argument as a form of elegant social subversion. Maybe she's subtly trying to point out the how the cultural baggage that follows from a mere difference in names can have dire consequences. Is this a cautionary tale in disguise?
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