Same-sex muddle

There were a lot of things that irritated me about Bob Rae's appearance on the Mercer Report (although I seem to be alone in having actually found the skinny-dipping funny), but nothing more than this exchange:

Rae: There are people who are driven by nasty theories, by particular, uh--

Mercer: Give us an example, Bob.

Rae: Oh, all this resistance to-- uh-- to uh-- same-- same-sex?

Now, don't get me wrong, Bob, I appreciate your political views on this particular matter. But let me enlighten you about something. 'Same-sex' is an adjective. It's impossible to "resist" an adjective. You can resist a noun, or you can resist a noun with an adjectival modifier, but an adjective alone? No can do.

Now, I make money at this sort of thing in real life (yeah, yeah, I know, "get a real job"), and so I've trained my expert eye on Rae's usage here. And my professional opinion on what's happening is that the noun in the noun phrase 'same-sex marriage' has been deleted from Rae's sentence, leaving the poor, lowly adjective to carry the whole phrase on its tiny little back. Furthermore, it seems that Bob Rae is far from alone in this odd little linguistic innovation. In fact, within just the last couple of months, it's spread across Canada like a bad rash at a nudist camp. But the thing is, you can drop the noun in a noun phrase, but you can't prevent the adjective from clinging to other nouns. And that's when we start moving from eye-rollers to some real head-scratchers.

Last week, for example, the Globe and Mail told us about the same-sex debate. I can't be the only one who envisioned a gaggle of men at podiums without a woman in sight. Around the same time, the Winnipeg Free Press predicted a same-sex showdown--perhaps a horde of gunslinging women out in the town square, glaring menacingly at each other? Would the same-sex opponents the Globe mentions be Bob Rae himself and his friend-cum-nemesis, Michael Ignatieff, or two male hockey heroes from opposing teams? Would the same-sex ban referred to by the Wisconsin State Journal be one of those weird singles clubs that insists on gender balance at events? And then there's my personal favourite--the legal furor that's reportedly erupting over a same-sex proposal. Perhaps that's something like:

Adam (nervously): Um, we've been together a long time. And I think, maybe, it's about time we thought about...getting married.

Steve (affronted): WHAT? MARRIED? US? OH MY GOD, I AM GOING TO SUE YOU!!!

The part that really muddies the waters, though, is that in deciding to start dropping nouns from noun phrases all willy-nilly, papers like the Globe haven't stopped using 'same-sex' as a perfectly ordinary adjective meaning "of or relating to two or more persons of the same gender." In one of today's headlines, for example, they tell us about advocates of same-sex schooling. Now, is that supposed to mean "schooling involving people of the same sex," or is it supposed to mean "education about same-sex (marriage)"? I'm honestly not sure anymore.

Perhaps Bob Rae can enlighten us.