As Seen On The Bathroom Wall

You hear it thrown around so often lately.

"The Sanctity of Marriage"

It's a phrase that's become the political platform of countless conservatives, neocons, and fundamentalists the world over. Protect marriage! Save marriage! One man and one woman!

Oh sure. It sounds like it's a noble cause, one that anyone would want to fight for. Until you get to their reasons for wanting to "save" it, and "protect" it and who exactly they think they need to "save" it from.

Homosexuals.

The Gays.

Or for you forum fanatics out there, teh [sic] gays.

See, for those who don't know because they've been living under a rock - or because you're Amish, and if you are, WTF are you doing on the computer anyway? The computer and the internets are the debbil!!! - homosexuals want the right to marry someone of the same sex because like most people, they feel that it's their right to leg shackle themselves to another human being for as long as they live. Or, if you're a Republican, for as long as it takes for you to find a new mistress and dump your hospital-bed-bound wife.

Shocking, isn't it?

Now, it's to be expected that the arguments that come against it - and I've listed a few in previous blogs - deal mainly with the religious connotations. Hey, you can't be a conservative and NOT be religious. It goes against the rulebook!

However, an article was brought to my attention today that lists some of the most asinine, ludicrous, hilarious, bass-ackwards justifications imaginable. Sam Schulman wrote a column piece titled "The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage" in which he explains what he believes to be the worst thing about gay marriage and why. It's a long, windbagesque diatribe of strawmen and red herrings that could, quite possibly, be the cure to insomnia or the cause of aortic embolisms; I'm not sure which yet as I'm still recovering from my eyes bleeding onto my keyboard.

For fun, and to save you all a lot of time, I'm going to list some of the reasons given, and in no particular order, though I'm certain it wouldn't really matter what order I place them in because they won't make any more sense - trust me, this isn't Jenga.

And here we go:

• A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin. It will be nothing like the new kinship structure that a marriage imposes willy-nilly on two families who would otherwise loathe each other.



• Gay spouses have none of our guilt about sex-before-marriage.



• marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality. The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage. This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known.



• This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage. Virginity until marriage, arranged marriages, the special status of the sexuality of one partner but not the other (and her protection from the other sex)--these motivating forces for marriage do not apply to same-sex lovers.



• A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships. If Tommy marries Bill, and they divorce, and Bill later marries a woman and has a daughter, no incest prohibition prevents Bill's daughter from marrying Tommy. The relationship between Bill and Tommy is a romantic fact, but it can't be fitted into the kinship system.



• children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate)



• In gay marriage there are no virgins (actual or honorary), no incest, no illicit or licit sex, no merging of families, no creation of a new lineage.



• People in gay marriages will discover that mimicking the cozy bits of romantic heterosexual marriage does not make relationships stronger; romantic partners more loving, faithful, or sexy; domestic life more serene or exciting. They will discover that it is not the wedding vow that maintains marriages, but the force of the kinship system. Kinship imposes duties, penalties, and retribution that champagne toasts, self-designed wedding rings, and thousands of dollars worth of flowers are powerless to effect.

Well now, aren't you glad that you read that? Don't you feel that much more informed?

Oh, by the way, the author of this particular article has been married three(3) times. I suppose one could argue that it wasn't the vows that made him want to get married so often, or the flowers, or the children. No. It was the kinship. The loving, wonderful kinship of having three mother-in-laws who hate him, three father-in-laws who want his brothers-in-law to kick his ass, and countless other family members-in-law to show him what happens when you fail to practice what you preach.

Of course, I'm still working on the bumper sticker that reads: "The Sanctity of Marriage: Protect It By Marrying As Often As You Can".

Isn't that right, Mr. Shulman, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Gingrich, Mr. McCain and so on...?