The same-sex marriage bans that eleven states passed in the last elections have brought a new excitement and hope in the Sanctity of Marriage crowd. Of course, victories always leave one with that slightly depressed feeling afterwards: what is there left to work for? Don't worry about the emotional health of the wingnuts; they have their plans for the next stage of the campaign:
NEW YORK (AP) -- "Protection of marriage" is now the watchword for many activists fighting to prevent gays and lesbians from marrying. Some conservatives, however, say marriage in America began unraveling long before the latest gay-rights push and are pleading for a fresh, soul-searching look at the institution.
"When you talk about protecting marriage, you need to talk about divorce," said Bryce Christensen, a Southern Utah University professor who writes frequently about family issues.
While Christensen doesn't oppose the campaign to enact state and federal bans on gay marriage, he worries it's distracting from immediate threats to marriage's place in society.
"If those initiatives are part of a broader effort to reaffirm lifetime fidelity in marriage, they're worthwhile," he said. "If they're isolated - if we don't address cohabitation and casual divorce and deliberate childlessness - then I think they're futile and will be brushed aside."
I hope that you are prepared for this. I especially like the idea that they are going to address deliberate childlessness in marriage. What would addressing that entail? Requiring fertility checks of couples who have not reproduced within some reasonable period of time? Or banning all contraception? The latter is more likely. The plan would also have to address women's economic independence as that makes divorce easier, and I wouldn't be surprised if there was emphasis on the need to reinstall a male-dominated family structure even among nonbelievers. After all, it is the institution of traditional marriage that is to be saved here.
Isn't it interesting how the wingnuts don't fight for people. They always fight for institutions that are not living, feeling, hurting entities but just ideas. Marriage must be preserved and the way to do that is to force people to fit into the mold they have for marriage. Nothing else will do! This sounds very much like the extremist Stalinist form of communism and shows how the view of politics as a long line with extreme righties at one end and extreme lefties at the other end is wrong: the true diagram would be a circle where the extremists are sitting quite close to each other. That's why they often jump from one end to the other so easily.