By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
"What's in a name?" goes the venerable rhetorical question, followed by the stock definition, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
Seeming about as mundane was the advertised subject, "What is a Family?", of one of a series of lectures we attend.
The thought of it hardly tantalized me to the point of keeping me awake at night. As a matter of fact, on the few sleepless nights with which I was assailed prior to the lecture date, the subject did not even come close to competing with the morning's comic strip.
Had you asked for my definition of a family, I might have answered glibly that Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear filled the bill, with Goldilocks being the "odd man out."
When I was a child in the environment to which I often refer, parents and kids formed the family. Ours was among the unusual few with only one parent, due to my father's untimely demise. Another difference was that a mongrel dog had slyly insinuated himself into the family circle, despite my mother's frequently expressed (initial) dictum that a dog's place was outdoors, and not in the house.
Whatever my prior reservations about the lecture, they disappeared quickly on the day of revelation. To the lectern, but shunning the microphone, strode a smart-looking woman who looked considerably younger than the years required to earn a doctorate in law and an impressive catalog of achievements.
From the word "go", knowledge and wisdom tumbled
from her lips non-stop, but in an organized sequence that methodically
(and with hardly stopping for breath) took us from the naively
primitive definition I might have offered for the subject, through
the legal labyrinth of variations stemming from diversity of life
and death, and moving on through latter-day complexities arising
from modern developments such as the increasing
incidence of divorce, single-parenthood through accident or option,
adoptive parenthood, and male and female partners choosing a union
not blessed through either civil or religious rites.
Even ingenuous me sensed, before Dr. Cossman (duly wedded) was more than three-quarters through her analysis, where this whole thing was going, and I'm certain you have guessed.
In fairness, the speaker came through not as a fanatic advocate of same-sex unions, but as an accomplished debater presenting the logic of them to an open-minded but skeptically inclined constituency. She came closer than any of the band-wagon liberals, with their me-too insistence espousing a suddenly popular cause, to convince me of a certain logic - at least in a legal sense.
Went away wondering about one important point. It was stressed that in the long-accepted family definitions, the man and woman heading the household must have a conjugal relationship.
Which makes me wonder: if in this brave new world a brother
and sister choose jointly to raise children (perhaps orphaned
relatives), must they, in order to enjoy important legal benefits
such as taxation and succession privileges, start "conjugating"?
Hmmmmm!
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