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Now hear this: Our great leader has just declared October 12-18 Marriage Protection Week!
Well, I'm married myself (15 years this December) and marriage has been very good to me, so I am interested in doing all I can to help protect the institution. So I visited the White House website about this...and imagine my surprise! They don't want people to protect my marriage at all!
"Marriage is a sacred institution, and its protection is essential to the continued strength of our society. Marriage Protection Week provides an opportunity to focus our efforts on preserving the sanctity of marriage and on building strong and healthy marriages in America. Marriage is a union between a man and a woman, and my Administration is working to support the institution of marriage by helping couples build successful marriages and be good parents."
Bastards. Well, you know what, I've been protecting my own marriage for the past 15 years, and doing a pretty good job of it without the White House's help. I guess that means our marriage must be kicking butt, compared to the national average. I mean I can't help but feel bad for all those straight marriages that need all this 'defense' and 'protection' from Congress and the White House. It really does boggle the mind. I mean, if you're straight, you have all kinds of people 'helping' you get married and stay married. Your family wants you to get married. Your church wants you to get married. Your state government doesn't care too much one way or the other but once you are married, they'll make it harder for you to stop being married. And now the federal government has made it known that they want you to get married. And yet...and yet...somehow...lots of straight people don't get married, and even worse, lots of straight people who do get married get divorced! I don't understand it! How can it be?
I don't know...could it be that pressuring people into getting married isn't the best way to protect marriage?
We certainly weren't pressured into marrying. Quite the opposite. My family didn't even know about our relationship for 2 1/2 years and when I finally did tell them, well, let's just say that it took my mother a further 8 years to be willing to interact with Liza in anything like a civil manner and leave it at that. We have never lived in a state with a domestic partnership law--in fact, fate has perversely chosen for us states with outstandingly reactionary politics and politicians--and we were both raised Catholic, so you can work out for yourself the odds of our ever having a church wedding. And yet, somehow, fifteen years later, we're still together--and still in love, still crazy about each other, etc. How did we do it? Without legal rights, without the Church's blessing, and without special presidential proclamations issued about how important our relationship is to the health of society and the state, what enabled us to stay happily married?
Well, I'll tell you the secret, folks. We are still married to each other because we want to be married to each other--and for no other reason.
That's what makes the difference between a long-term relationship and a lifetime commitment, folks: it's not a legal document or a gold ring, it's an absolute conviction that you need to be with this one person and nothing else will do. It's knowing that from now on the two of you are sharing one life, with all of its craziness and joy and misery and everything else, and that if you lost this person you would survive but it wouldn't really be living. It's knowing that one person, this one, the one you love, is an irreplaceable part of everything good in the world.
And it's knowing that you need to take care of that person *first,* despite your own selfishness, despite the horrors of the world we live in, despite work and the church and the state and all the obstacles that get thrown up in your path. It's knowing that you will always do what it takes to keep your love alive--and trusting that the other person knows it too, and will do the same.
Now if you've got all that, then your marriage is protected, no matter what the morons in Washington try to do to destroy it. If you don't, then your marriage is wide-open vulnerable, no matter what the morons in Washington try to do to save it.
When you put your heart and soul into a marriage and it doesn't work out, it's the worst thing that can really happen to a person. I've seen straight friends of mine go through this and it's agonizing enough to watch from a distance; I don't know how people live through it when it happens to them. But as much as I wish I could save all of my straight friends from the pain of divorce, I would never wish on them the kind of 'protection' that the White House appears to be encouraging. Because the one thing that would be more painful than getting divorced from someone you once loved would be having to stay married to that person after all the love was gone because the state and the church forced you to do it. The bottom line is that the only people who can save a marriage are the people who are in it, and no matter what kind of encouragement or support you provide, if the two of them cannot keep it alive, then there is nothing anyone else can do about it.
Here's the kind of 'help' that we all can do without: Fox will celebrate Marriage Protection Week by promoting and airing Joe Millionaire II, The International Edition. They have been advertising this during the Cubs games all week and it looks unutterably foul. A dozen plus European women compete for the affections of a "real American cowboy with a fake American fortune." Though the women appear to be drawn from a number of different countries, it is apparent that to Fox, Europe = France. "Would we lie to a bunch of European women who've never heard of Joe Millionaire? Oui, oui!" chortles one voiceover; another spot ends with "does anyone know the French for 'sucker'?"
The foulness of the Joe Millionaire concept, which trades on the old misogynist gold-digger type by inviting the viewers at home to despise these women for humiliating themselves in order to whore for a man who doesn't even have the goods, becomes exponentially more foul once it goes global. If Fox's honchos were paying any attention to our great leader when he frothed about sex slavery during his U.N. speech on Iraq, they would perhaps have realized that to build a show around a bunch of women from Europe prostituting themselves in order to snare a rich American man might have some unfortunate overtones. What's next? Joe Millionaire heads to a Thai brothel, while Americans guffaw as the brothel's owner and inmates compete to fawn all over him for his custom, only to find out after he checks out that his credit card has been declined? Because that's what we're reducing the whole transaction to, basically, once we turn on something like this.
And let's not even get into The Bachelor, Love Or Money, Temptation Island, and Married By America. Because I don't even know what all this shit means. That young Americans, frustrated with the singles scene, are now yearning for the days when marriages were business transactions and your partner was chosen for you? That the only aspect of the romantic model of marriage that has survived our decline into mondo capitalism is the dream of marrying the prince? That America has a limitless appetite for shows based around the humiliation of real women? Whatever it is, it's pretty fucking scary--and if I were interested in preserving marriage as a institution, I might go after the monstrosity that is reality TV before I went out looking for gay people to bother.
So. For President Bush and all the other people in the federal government who are so fucking concerned about the institution of marriage, I am happy to report that my marriage is in the pink and bloom of health and that we expect it to continue robust and fruitful until one or both of us dies. Good luck to all you straight married folks! From what I can tell, it's a jungle out there.
C ya,
The Plaid Adder
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