More Fun With Gay Marriage

The best way to deal with this issue is humor and warmth. My own bumper sticker idea:

If You Don't Like Gay Marriage, Don't Apply For One

It's based on a couple of old preacher jokes that aren't worth repeating here.

Please remember that just like God Hates Fags, God Hates Shrimp.

Also, here's twelve ways that gay marriage will destroy America. The first three:

1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control are not natural.

2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people cannot get legally married because the world needs more children.

3. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children because straight parents only raise straight children.

Okay, let's get serious. Frank Rich has an op-ed at the New York Times this morning:

Here's the denouement of the epic drama over gay marriage. It's going to happen, it's going to happen within a generation, and it's going to happen even though George W. Bush teed off his re-election campaign this week by calling for a constitutional amendment to outlaw it. As the country has now had weeks to digest, it has already happened in bulk in San Francisco, where images of couples waiting all night in the rain to be wed finally wiped Janet Jackson off our TV screens. The first of those couples, Phyllis Lyon, 79, and Del Martin, 83, were celebrating a partnership of 51 years. Take that, heterosexual marriage! The most famous practitioner of mixed-sex nuptials this year, Britney Spears, partook of a Vegas marriage that clocked in at 55 hours.

Whatever their short-term legal fate, the San Francisco weddings mark a new high-water mark in one of the most fast-paced cultural tsunamis America has seen. As Evan Wolfson, the civil rights lawyer who founded Freedom to Marry, says, "An act as unremarkable as getting a wedding license" has been transformed by the people embracing it, much as the unremarkable act of sitting at a Formica lunch counter was transformed by an act of civil disobedience at a Woolworth's in North Carolina 44 years ago this month. Gavin Newsom, the heterosexual, Irish Catholic mayor of San Francisco, described his proactive strategy for advancing same-sex marriage to Time magazine: "Put a human face on it. Let's not talk about it in theory. Give me a story. Give me lives." And so now there have been thousands of gay wedding stories, many of them with the couples' parents and children in the supporting cast, at the same City Hall where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio famously got hitched to no good end a half-century ago.

I thought that my next big obsession was going to be this issue, but Mr. Rich has put a ribbon on it for me.

Marriage, at its heart, is about intimate companionship. If two people are willing to throw their resources together and aim for the long term, the state has an interest in seeing that they can make it. The most powerful bond to ensure such a relationship works is love and mutual attraction. That's why marriage is built on the relationship between lovers. The rush of sexual attraction provides the initial momentum for the marriage. It's the motive for building a life together - for sharing the ups and downs, the bills, the laughter, the heartache, the boredom. It gives a greater degree of stability to these lives, and that stability is the state's true interest in the matter. That's the shelter that can raise a healthy family, or build a better community.

Marriage is going to be abused by gay people, the same way it's abused by straight people. But there will be those couples that do the institution credit. These people deserve the mantle of public recognition that marriage provides. We'll all be better for it.