language to reflect the difference between their goods and lower-quality, marginalized goods.
These people believe that the perceived value of their relationship will be damaged from the
association with the marginalized one. Second, those who do not wish to distinguish are the ones
who have the marginalized object and hope to benefit from the failure to distinguish. This model,
admittedly, is not very flattering to advocates of same-sex marriage, because it implies that, in a
sense, the opponents are right: opposite-sex marriage is the real thing, and those who advocate
same-sex marriage hope to include lower-quality relationships in the category of higher-quality
ones.
Yet there is another possible interpretation of this debate in light of our previous analysis. It
is that advocates of excluding same-sex couples from marriage simply wish to preserve their
privileged position. In the economic marketplace, suppliers who have a monopoly on a desirable
label will wish to preserve that monopoly, even if another supplier comes along and offers a good
that is equivalent (in the relevant respects) but which does not have access to that label. Hence
both sides in this debate recognize the power of the word "marriage" in controlling access to some
social value, but have a different interpretation of what is going on here: one side believes that
advocates of same-sex marriage are trying to pass off a counterfeit by eliminating a real distinction,
while the other sees opponents of same-sex marriage as simply seeking to preserve a valuable
monopoly – to preserve, that is, a distinction that is primarily a function of the frame. In practice,
the desire to block access to market (here social) benefits is often disguised as protecting the true
meaning of language. By arguing that government regulation of distinction is merely preserving
true language, it allows opponents to deny their interest in preserving exclusive access to these
benefits.
The implicit corollary to the idea of a “true meaning” is that expanding the definition of a
word necessarily means that any distinction will be lost. Obviously, this is not so. If the definition
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Convention