Five Gay Marriage Myths
Myth #1: Marriage is fundamentally a voluntary union of persons in a committed relationship We tend to think of language as something posterior to thought. A thought comes into your mind and then you find the right words to express it. Anthropologists and neuroscientists are currently doing some fascinating work on the relationship between thought and speech and have discovered that things are a little more complicated. Speech does not merely proceed from our thoughts like a one-way street. Rather, researchers have been finding that there is also traffic flowing in the other direction: how we speak affects how we think about the world on a level that our conscious minds may never even be aware. As psychologist Lera Boroditsky put it in a Wall Street Journal article summarizing some of this research, “the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express”. There are fascinating examples of this from all over the world, but th...