RUSH: I’m just waiting for the printer to spit something out here. It’s about the chief justice. Here’s the headline: “Chief Justice John Roberts Compares Gay Marriage To Forcing A Child To Call Someone ‘A Friend.'” They have released the audio of the oral arguments now, and this is the story from Mediaite. “The optimism that Jean Podrasky, cousin of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, displayed when she told The Los Angeles Times that she ‘trust(s) he will go in a good direction’ in deciding whether same-sex couples have the right to marry may have been misplaced. On MSNBCÂ’s Andrea Mitchell Reports Tuesday afternoon, fill-in host Chris Cillizza played some sound from todayÂ’s oral arguments on Proposition 8, in which Roberts compares gay marriage rights to forcing a child to call someone a friend.”

Whoa-ho! That could not have gone over well inside the court.

“In one of the early pieces of sound to emerge from oral arguments … Roberts made a particularly brain-dead comparison that might portend disappointment for his cousin. ‘If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say “this is my friend,” but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend. And that’s, it seems to me, what (supporters?) of Proposition 8 are saying here. All youÂ’re interested in is the label, and you insist on changing the definition of the label.'”

So let me interpret this for you. What Roberts is saying, marriage is a man and a woman. It’s what it’s always been. It’s what the word means. Now you want the label to mean something new so you may as well start telling kids that they have to tell everybody that they’re their friend. I know exactly what he’s talking about. He’s simply saying marriage is what it is. If you go to the dictionary, marriage has a specific definition.

Now, if you’re coming here and saying that you want to change that definition, then you are essentially just telling everybody that they must accept everybody as their friend or as they want to be accepted and that definitions don’t mean anything. Tommy Christopher, the Mediaite reporter, refers to that as brain-dead. And I think that’s classic. I think that perfectly illustrates where we are. We have a low-information reporter here who doesn’t care what the definition of a word is, who doesn’t care what the meaning of it is. All that matters to this brain-dead reporter is that the chief justice doesn’t see the world the way he does, and therefore the chief justice is brain-dead.

It’s what I’ve always said, the real problem with low-information people is not what they don’t know; it’s what they do know that’s wrong. And that was actually an utterance of the famous and great Ronaldus Magnus. The problem is not what they don’t know; it’s what they do know that’s wrong, or what they do know that isn’t right.

I tell you, once this gets out, this is gonna be the focal point of everybody’s discussion, and they’re gonna humiliate Roberts. You haven’t seen anything yet. Once this gets out, and it is out now: “Chief Justice Roberts compares gay marriage to forcing a child to call someone a ‘friend.'” And the proponents of gay marriage, I mean this is the most important thing in the world. It’s the most important thing in the world, and it’s love, it’s about love, and here’s Roberts making fun of it and impugning it, diminishing it, acting like these people are just a bunch of kids. Oh, this is not gonna sit well with the low-information crowd in the media, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We have the audio of Chief Justice Roberts during oral arguments on the same-sex marriage case today.

ROBERTS: If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, “This is my friend,” but it changes the definition of what it means to be a friend — and that, it seems to me, what supporters of Proposition 8 are saying here. All you’re interested in is the label, and you insist on changing the definition of the label.

RUSH: I hate to say it — I mean, I really hate to say it — but he’s dead-on right. You know, words mean things. At the root level, that’s what this is all about. It’s about changing definitions to include people who don’t automatically (What’s the word?) qualify. That’s all this is about when you boil it all down, and every argument made to advance it is marketing and packaging. Now, where does this come from, by the way? “If you tell a child that somebody has to be their friend, I suppose you can force the child to say, ‘This is my friend.'” Are there schools that do that? Would he maybe have had a child in a school where that was required?

Are there schools that make the children refer to every other child as their friend and the teachers refer to the students as their friends, and might he have had a child in such a school? What are the odds? So the media guy is calling him a meathead, but you boil this down to its essence, to its most simple, and this is exactly what this is about. It isn’t a civil rights issue. It isn’t a love issue. It isn’t any of that. If everybody is your friend, then there’s no such thing as a friend — and if anybody can marry anybody, there really isn’t anything called “marriage” anymore.

Marriage is a word. It’s in the dictionary. Look it up. It has a meaning.

It did not evolve out of any form of bigotry or discrimination.

It didn’t evolve negatively at all.

It wasn’t created negatively.

It wasn’t created to exclude anybody because everybody has the choice. Anybody in the world can get married, if you convince somebody to marry you (or trick them or whatever you do). But marriage is not something that’s denied people. Now, I know I’ve really stepped in it with the traditional low-information argument as it’s advanced today, but, I’m sorry. It’s what it is. Marriage is not discriminatory. No matter who you are, if you’re a human being, you can get married as marriage is defined. So what is happening here is that a tradition or a custom or what have you, now must be altered and changed to mean something it doesn’t mean.

I’ll tell you: The media is gonna harp on this. They’re gonna just jump on this.

Folks, I’m warning you: This could be fascinating to watch.