“A traditional Jewish wedding,” Leftist style
George Orwell understood that he who controls language controls thought. Humpty Dumpty understood it too. So does the Left. Case in point:
My daughter and I have a guilty pleasure: We watch Say Yes To The Dress: Atlanta. We recognize the show’s schlock manipulation, but we just like see all the different wedding dresses on all the different body types. It’s a visual treat.
Today’s episode had a little segment devoted to the lesbian brides who came to the salon to pick up the wedding dresses they had ordered in a previous episode (which, I don’t know how, but we managed to miss). After talking about meeting on the beach and falling in love, one of the brides started talking about the wedding. “We’re going to have a traditional Jewish wedding,” she said, at which point I inhaled my own spit, and started half laughing, half choking.
My daughter, a product of the 21st century, didn’t understand what I was laughing about. My sister, still, like me, a 20th century holdover, immediately grasped what was so funny about a “traditional lesbian Jewish wedding.”
I explained to my daughter that, while the Old Testament is silent on lesbianism, one can infer from its hostility to male homosexuality that the traditionalists probably wouldn’t have looked fondly upon a “traditional lesbian Jewish wedding.” If there’s one thing the Old Testament is clear about, it’s the fact that a marriage is a guy/gal, male/female, man/woman kind of thing.
This is not to say that lesbians cannot create a lovely, meaningful wedding ceremony that grafts the externalities of a Jewish wedding onto their ceremony. They can stand under the chuppah (which these gals didn’t), have a rabbi, say the Hebrew prayers and vows in English or in Hebrew, and even break the glass (as both brides did), but that doesn’t make it “traditional,” in the sense of something handed down from generation to generation. Years from now, their ceremony may mark the start of a new tradition to be handed down to future generations, but only in the perverse world of Leftist speak is it a direct stand-in for the old traditions.