herebedragonflies asked helpymchelperson:
Helpy, if gay marriage is legalized in Minnesota, where will it end?
Usually, a marriage ends only with the divorce or death of one of the spice. (With the move from “husband and wife” to “spouse and spouse”, we find that the slightly irregular plural-formation rules of English come to the fore; in this case, by analogy with “mouse” and “mice”, we find that the plural of “spouse” is “spice”.)
However, it may be you are curious, not about where a given gay marriage will end, but rather, the end of the process of which “gay marriage is legalized in Minnesota” is but one small part. There are two aspects of this to evaluate. The first is the question of what Minnesota might legalize next, and when they will run out of things to legalize. For this, Helpy would hesitate to guess; even Helpy’s drawn-on glasses cannot always pierce the vale of the future. You may confidently assume, however, that whatever it is, people will threaten to move someplace where it is already legal in protest.
The other is the question of where the legalization of gay marriage will end. In the United States, the answer is probably either Alabama or Utah. Alabama holds some notoriety for being the last state to repeal their law against interracial marriage (it was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, but remained on the books until 2000). Utah’s strong Mormon presence has a reputation for influencing legislation significantly. Of course, it’s quite possible that the question will end up settled at a federal level before that — the thirty-three year gap for interracial marriage is a little surprising, maybe, but not impossible.
