I Now Pronounce You…Domestically Partnered

Reading the news today, and of course HAD to click on the link describing the newest gay-marriage fiasco in California. In case you haven't been following, there is a challenge to last fall's reprehensible limitation of civil rights known as Proposition 8; the challenge is in federal court, which means we'll probably ultimately see the U.S. Supreme Court decide the issue for ALL states. (Decide on your own how much you like states' rights being trampled like that…)

The attorney for the Prop 8 dipshits supporters had this to say in his opening statement:

"It is the purpose of marriage — the central purpose of marriage — to ensure, or at least encourage and to promote that when life is brought into being, it is by parents who are married and who take the responsibility of raising that child together."

Well, once you get around the terrible way that was phrased (don't these lawyers have to go to college for at least a little while?), he seems to be saying two things: 1) that the central purpose of marriage is to have kids, and 2) that those kids should be borne by married parents who'll share child-rearing responsibilities.

So. My aunt and her husband, who have been married for 18 years, are somehow "less" of a couple because they are childless? Should we enact a statute of limitations on marriage, so that couples who don't have a child within 7 years automatically have their marriages annulled?

And, what does that make my mother? A whore, some less-than-perfect parent because she (for all intents and purposes) raised me alone? 'Cause, yeah, I turned out oh-so terribly. Menace to society that I am, with my long hair and radical views and rock-&-roll music…

Then, what about Gene Simmons and Shannon Tweed? No one besides the two of them will ever know why he won't commit to it, or how badly she wants it, but by law, they ain't married. So, what about their two kids? Right, Nick and Sophie, couple'a drug-addled young adults, right there…total wastes, always trying to overcome their broken household, which is clearly a den of total iniquity…

Get it? Do ya fuckin' GET IT?!? There's no "ideal" marriage, there's no standard that everyone who takes on that mammoth commitment should have to uphold…there's just life, and family. Good families and bad ones, happy homes and shitty ones…and you don't have to be married or not in order to be one or the other. Let's face it, those Prop 8 dweebs are only interested in one thing: creating a club of exclusivity for themselves, based on some misbegotten notion of their own religious brainwashing, and too afraid they might one day have to define themselves when they claim the mantle of marriage. "Oh, you're married? To a man, or a woman?" Pussy-ass dudes afraid of their own sexual curiosity are ramming an abhorrent affront to civil liberty and stable families down all of our throats. Which, you know, is not an accidental metaphor.

Personally, I liked what the judge had to say: "If California would simply get out of the marriage business and classify everyone as a domestic partnership, would that solve the problem?"

You know, I bet it might.