(if I were the) King of the Forest

During the last presidential campaign John Kerry scored populist points castigating “greedy corporations” who avoided paying their “fare share” of taxes by “sheltering” their profits in foreign countries. In an era of corporate downsizing and record budget deficits that topic resonated with many people, and the charges were repeated widely before disappearing under the weight of other criticism more easily tied directly to George Bush. But before they disappeared The Boston Globe ran a piece by Stephen Glain on the topic in their business section. I sincerely believe there is a lot of questionable – or downright dishonest – stuff going on behind the corporate veil in support of avoiding taxes. But I also believe that a business reporter should consider the possibility that some practices characterized by populist politicians as malfeasance may actually have a rational and legitimate basis in business principles – and that a reporter writing a story on the topic should at least talk to some people in business who are using those practices before writing the story about them.

If a state chooses to live up to the more modern understanding of its obligation to fairness and equality under the law by creating a gender-neutral form of civil union, that is certainly just and arguably wise. If a same-sex couple, having been properly joined by such a state-sanctioned civil union, chooses to call themselves “married” some may contradict them but no one can or should stop them. If a church chooses to sanctify their union and call it “marriage” in the eyes of God, that is their right. If members of their community choose to honor the union with the same designation, then the communal sense of marriage will begin to evolve. If enough people in enough communities defer to the new usage then the traditional concept of marriage will begin to lose its name and, our ability to conceptualize it thereby undermined, will slowly fade from our cultural memory, just as gayness did decades ago. And we will be culturally poorer for that even as we are culturally more inclusive.

But that is a transformation that should be decided individual by individual in a cultural dialog over years or generations, in which some are free to preserve the old concepts and others to embrace the new until the weight of cultural consensus removes the last holdouts – or never does. It is not a transformation that should be enforced by political power.