After a few years spent up here in the States and taking an almost-daily news bath, very little surprises me about American politics. I expected Owens would beat Hoffman, Bloomberg would beat Thompson, Christie would beat Corzine and McDonnell would trounce… that dude with the weird name who ran against him.

Of course, if nothing surprised me, there’d be no fun left in this country, so for good measure Maine — a state with a reputation for no-nonsense, independent-minded policy — repealed the state’s same-sex marriage law before it ever took effect, thus wasting upwards of six million dollars and leaving me utterly mystified. Even Spain — good old Catholic Spain, the seat of that horrible Inquisition which Anglo-Saxons would never, ever emulate — has permitted gay people to marry and, somehow, the good ol’ USA is lagging behind the rest of the developed world. Again.

As something of a language person, I can’t help but think some of this is due to the term “gay marriage.” This is somewhat of a unique feature to the United States. Most, if not all of the other countries to legalize gay marriage know it as “civil union” — because, in those countries, a “civil certificate of union,” or some other permutation of the words, is the legal document certifying that the government considers two people spouses, rather than a cheap cop-out employed by moderate Democrats in swing states. Here, thanks to the embers of once-fiery Puritanism, states still issue “marriage licenses” — and isn’t talk of gay weddings how the folks get scared enough to vote these measures down?

The fairest solution would, of course, be to equalize everyone in the eyes of the state through civil union legislation for everyone — not just gays — and then the heterosexuals among us might suddenly realize the second-class status to which they thoughtlessly confine others. Wouldn’t that be a nice lesson for them to learn?