Marriage Protection

Yesterday Bryan Alexander at Right Thinking discussed Dennis Byrne's post on the Marriage Amendment. They were both brilliant.

How better to stop the rhetoric--the declarations of bigotry--than to flip the amendment on its ear? Byrne recommends a Sexual Orientation Protection Amendment:

"Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sexual orientation."

Then let the debate begin. It could really be fun watching liberal senators chase their tails as they try to figure out whether to pander to their base or to the voters.

Bryan Alexander adds:

[I]t does remind me of a similar turning of the table orchestrated by House Republicans last November after Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Republicans quickly wrote a resolution of their own calling for immediate withdrawal. A vote was held, and the resolution was defeated 403-3.

It's beautiful watching the opposition get a taste of their own medicine, a veritable hoisting by their own petard.

And after I read Bryan's and Byrne's posts, I was consumed by a curiosity that has plagued me occasionally since I first heard the word back in Junior High: What exactly is a "petard?" Dictionary.com provided the answer in a great cosmic convergence.

2 entries found for petard.

pe·tard ( P ) Pronunciation Key (p-tärd)n.

1. A small bell-shaped bomb used to breach a gate or wall.
2. A loud firecracker.

[French pétard, from Old French, from peter, to break wind, from pet, a breaking of wind, from Latin pditum, from neuter past participle of pdere, to break wind. See pezd- in Indo-European Roots.]

Word History: The French used pétard, “a loud discharge of intestinal gas,” for a kind of infernal engine for blasting through the gates of a city. “To be hoist by one's own petard,” a now proverbial phrase apparently originating with Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1604) not long after the word entered English (around 1598), means “to blow oneself up with one's own bomb, be undone by one's own devices.” The French noun pet, “fart,” developed regularly from the Latin noun pditum, from the Indo-European root *pezd-, “fart.”

So there you have it. The arguments of traditional-marriage opponents on the Left are nothing more than the explosive breaking of wind, and their disingenuous accusations of bigotry have fouled the air.

Let's give them their own amendment so they can try to pass it. Let them clear the air around this once and for all.