Gay Marriage, for the last time (I hope)

I can't believe that I'm writing another post on this stupid topic, but I've been sounding off to my two-year-old about it and he's bored of the subject. So here I am, venting on the internet.

The Senate gay marriage amendment died today! (On the day I wrote this, which thanks to our crappy Net connection was a few days ago.) So that's good news, at least. However it also means I may be beating a dead horse here. But I have one or two more swings left in me, so here goes.

Besides, I'm not the only one. Lou Dobbs came out swinging in an editorial on cnn.com. His point, tying it in to his usual hot buttons, was that gay marriage is the least of the "attacks" on the American Family. I get the feeling that he also feels strongly that gays should get to marry, though he's never come out and said so.

The president and the Senate's Republican leadership are now claiming that an amendment to our Constitution is necessary to save the American family. No matter how you feel about the issue, and many of us feel deeply, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is utter and complete nonsense. It's an insult to the intelligence of every voter, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative.

The president and the Senate are focusing on one of the few reasons that has not been proven to cause divorce. They instead should look to financial hardships, and the lack of communication about family finances. The median family income is stagnating while gasoline costs and higher interest rates are eating up the family budget.

I'm sure somewhere in the article he mentioned that college tuition costs are up by 40%, since he usually rings that bell.

This is what I've been saying for years. If you really want to "protect marriage", then outlaw The Bachelor. Outlaw Las Vegas drunken quickie weddings. Outlaw divorce? No, then no one would ever get married and that would defeat the purpose. But outlaw gold diggers. Outlaw infidelity. Mandate monthly meetings with the two spouses and a CPA. (A report came out today that said the main cause of divorce is a lack of communication about finances.) Your marriage is more likely to break up because your husband ran off with his gold digger secretary after emptying your bank accounts and marrying her soused in Vegas than because he saw two men get married and thought that sounded like a good idea. If you're really concerned about marriage's virtue, then go after the big stuff first. Otherwise, you're just being a hypocrite, and what you really mean is that you don't want gays and lesbians to become respectable.

And I also came across Michael Scherer's "Who's afraid of the big bad gay marriage amendment?" on Salon.com today. He was reporting on the Senate floor debate, starring Sam Brownback (R, Kansas), who showed up with a lot of charts that meant nothing to back up his theories about gay marriage, which also meant nothing. The right had, as LD said, come out with a new "theory", which was that families in this country are collapsing. I'm not sure that's more true today than in the past, but in any case, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with gay marriage, as you'll see. As Scherer said, "...the principal argument mounted by social conservative leaders like Brownback has more to do with the fragile state of heterosexual marriage than homosexuality." To avoid too long of a quote, here are some of the points made in the article. (Quotes are credited, otherwise it's Michael Scherer describing a point made by the right.)

-- "Developmental problems are less common in two parent families." Brownback

-- welfare encourages out-of-wedlock births

-- If society approves of long-term homosexual monogamy, then the "institution of marriage" will be weakened. This will lead straight people to abandon monogamy and harm the welfare of the nation's children, who benefit from stable, two-parent families.

-- "Violent crime, youth crime, welfare dependency and child poverty track more closely with family breakdown than with any other social variable, including race and income level." Matt Daniels, founder of the Alliance for Marriage.

-- They talked about the damage done by deadbeat dads in the inner city, and the importance of family in minority communities.

OK, so we're all thinking the same thing, and according to the article, the press was too.

The press corps who had gathered for the event appeared universally baffled by the argument being made from behind the microphones. "How would outlawing gay marriage encourage heterosexual fathers to stick around?" asked the first wire service reporter to be called on for questions.

Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? The point everyone seems to be missing is that these families they are describing are straight families. Which isn't to say that gay families don't have problems, although gays (especially the ones who start families) tend to be more educated and more financially secure, so they're not ending up on welfare or suffer child poverty. And these problems that American Families are dealing with, as listed above, are not the result of gay people getting married. An undereducated man with no job prospects who has a juvie record isn't smacking his starving kids and leaving them with no child support because two other men got married. Scherer put it so well:

The American people are not given to amending the Constitution to punish one group of people (committed gay and lesbian couples) for the sins of another group (uncommitted straight couples).

Scherer also gave some good information from the APA:

Furthermore, the American Psychological Association has concluded that gay and lesbian parents are as likely as straight parents to provide supportive healthy environments for their children. There is no scientific evidence that children of homosexual parents are more likely to suffer abuse, psychological hardship or homosexual tendencies. Gay couples have been found to be just as happy -- and just as unhappy -- as heterosexual couples and similarly committed to long-term relationships.

So the ERR has shown its true colors, and so has the American people. First, the ERR came off sounding like idiots. All those charts and figures, and none of them had anything to do with gay marriage, as it turns out. And in this last-ditch effort to get this amendment in before the mid-term elections throws the right out of power, the ERR discovered that with every year that passes, the People are more accepting of gay marriage. Lastly, this was the worst timing when our collective prospects are in the toilet and we have all of these serious concerns-- not just legitimate attacks on the American Family, as Lou Dobbs pointed out, but two wars and one on the way, porous borders, an immigration situation, a still-weak FEMA and a looming hurricane season, and a collapsing middle class, (and, and, and...)-- which made this issue seem even more ridiculous than it has in the past.

After 9/11, the Onion ran an article, "A shattered nation longs to worry about stupid bullshit again." I think the ERR learned that even the people who don't think gays should marry still wish we could worry about something as stupid as a gay marriage amendment.

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