I have been hearing about little else but this issue these past few days, with it coming to a head today when the president endorsed his plan to enshrine discrimination as the law of the land.
Hyperbole aside, is this the most important issue he or his staff can come up with? How ’bout . . .
* The stagnant economy
* Iraq and it’s future: when do the troops come home?
* Afghanistan: are we sure democracy has taken root there?
As for a defense of marriage, I’d feel a lot better if the folks doing the defending had a better track record themselves. My guess is a lot of them are probably more experienced at marriage than I am, with more than one to draw from. (An interesting statistic would be how many elected representatives have successfully defended their own marriages.)
What about the millions of “traditional” marriages that are dissolved each year? How do we feel about that? Are we to believe that committed same-sex couples are going to do a lousier job of staying together and working through their problems that those who have the support of our societal mores? Or could the case be made that if they have stayed together without benefit of clergy and state protections, they may actually do a better job? If unmarried couples break up, there are no statistics, no legalities, and no stigma. Yet look at the folk who have been taking the plunge in San Francisco: they don’t look like they’re doing this on a whim.
According to national vital statistics data for 2000-2002, and a very few minutes work in Excel, we find that the rate of divorces to marriages is around 40% for those periods. Does anyone care about those numbers? Does anyone think that permitting same-sex couples to enjoy the same legal rights as everyone else is going to make things worse?
All they’re looking for is the same legal protections and rights the rest of us enjoy. The proposed amendment won’t prevent anyone from having a relationship: it will prevent them being able to make decisions as next of kin, to share in property after the death of a partner, to share benefits conferred as part of employment by a partner, little things like that. Have the people who think this issue is worthy of tampering with the Constitution considered the ramifications of this? Or is punishing people who are different all this is about?
The rhetoric seems to miss how deprecated marriage has become in recent years: some states have gone so far as to insist that aspiring celebrants complete some basic instruction in order to be licensed. In the face of that kind of disregard/apathy, how is expanding the definition of marriage going to weaken the institution? It sounds to me like we should welcome any attempt to take it seriously, no matter who makes the offer.
I guess the best thing about this is it should ensure the incumbent is a one term president, but I wish there was a less hurtful way to go about it.
now playing: Shane, She Wrote This from the album Television by Television
Josh Marshall, as usual, has a good read on this, but this recounting of a deeply cynical strategy from 30 years ago caught my eye . . .
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 22, 2004 – February 28, 2004 Archives:
It all reminds me of a line from a famous, or rather infamous, memo Pat Buchanan, then a White House staffer, wrote for Richard Nixon in, I believe, 1972 when their idea of the moment was what they called ‘positive polarization’.
At the end of this confidential strategy memo laying out various ideas about how to create social unrest over racial issues and confrontations with the judiciary, Buchanan wrote (and you can find this passage on p. 185 of Jonathan Schell’s wonderful Time of Illusion): “In conclusion, this is a potential throw of the dice that could bring the media on our heads, and cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”
And there you have it. Tear the country apart. And once it’s broken, our chunk will be bigger.