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On the purely linguistic side of the Minneapolis shooting (which looks as a totally intentional assassination by ICE to me) and the media reports on it. Does anyone, like me, feel puzzled from the naturalness and ease that media use when they talk about (the unjustly and brutally killed) Renee Good's "wife"? It's the same strange feeling I get when I read the online discussions on the PLURIBUS tv series and the first episode in which the female protagonist's "wife" is killed. What I find strange is the absolute nonchalance that is used in media to describe the partner of a woman as her "wife". The grumpy conservative in me would like to say: "No, no, no! She is a partner. She is a significant other. She is a lover. She is everything but she isn't a "wife". The word "wife" has a very different meaning!". Of course this is a tiny minority position: I understand that the zeitgeist, today, has completely normalized the use of the word "wife" to describe a woman who is sentimentally joined with another woman. But still I find a sense of uneasiness when I hear such uses of the "wife" word...
I am grateful, in Australia, that we have normalised the word 'partner', and media tends to exclusively use that. It's gender-neutral and it covers both married and non-married couples.
It's also an out for people like me, who think that 'wife' implies 'husband', and 'husband' implies 'wife', and therefore is unwilling to use either word in the context of a same-sex partnership.
There is still something lost in translation to partner. It may capture modern secular view of marriage as something akin to business partnership in Family LLC, where both owners have 50% share and which can be ended any time at court, mostly in favor of female shareholder. Which is far from actual sacramental marriage that involves holy vows etc. But I agree. I can be "partner registered by government" in view of outside society and a husband in sacramental marriage with my wife in front of my community.
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