Amend This!

It’s an election year, so it’s time for the wedge issues to be dragged out and plopped onto the national stage. You know, the supposed “issues” that sound good when bludgeoning your opponent, but in the long run don’t mean a thing, not even if you’ve got that swing. In 1988, the first George Bush smacked the hapless Michael Dukakis around with Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. He tried the same thing in 1992 with “family values” and a “culture war,” but that time it didn’t work. In 1996, Bob Dole asked “where’s the outrage?” when the American people failed to rise up over the GOP-manufactured “Clinton scandals.” The second George Bush gave us a campaign in 2000 based on “integrity,” then went on to preside over one of the most unethical Administrations in American history, one that made the Bill and Monica Show look like Howdy Doody.

And now we have yet another threat to Civilization As We Know It, and this time it’s called gay marriage. Or, as the Washington Times and other hard-right media outlets call it, “homosexual ‘marriage.’” But whatever you call it, it’s gotten the Republicans in a full-blown, frothing-at-the-mouth frenzy, to the point where the GOP introduced a constitutional amendment to chisel prejudice into the Constitution by barring gays and lesbians from marrying in America, now and forever. (Yes, these are the same Republicans who scream about how the Constitution is sacrosanct and can never be interpreted or amended in any way other than ways that would fit right into the 18th century.) The amendment was solidly defeated, not even getting a majority vote, much less the two-thirds needed to advance in the process.

I’m not sure what President Bush and the Republicans were thinking when they put so much political capital into pushing the amendment for a floor vote in the Senate. Perhaps they thought they could tap into that supposedly vast undercurrent in American society which still fears gays as “queers” and “faggots.” This only goes to prove that they have yet to discover that this is in fact the 21st century, and that many Americans have come to realize that gays and lesbians are actual human beings, not so different from the rest of us.

Meanwhile, our allegedly secular President has apparently taken on the role of Defender of the Faith as well, judging from his radio address last week. “If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract,” he said, apparently unaware that when you get right down to it, marriage in a civil society is a legal contract, “and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost, and the institution is weakened.” He also lashed out at the Massachusetts Supreme Court for calling marriage an “evolving paradigm.”

What nonsense. Of course marriage has evolved over the years and centuries. The original Christian Church wanted no part of marriage at all, seeing it as purely a secular and even anti-religious institution. Wives were seen as literally their husbands’ property, with no rights of their own at all. Indeed, it was only recently that a husband could be held legally accountable for raping his wife. And let us not forget the numerous laws preventing marriages between black slaves, and between people of different races and religions.

But all this has changed. Why? Because marriage and our concept of marriage have evolved.

President Bush and the GOP see marriage as “a union of a man and a woman.” Nothing more, nothing less. But if that were the case, Britney Spears would not have annulled her Las Vegas marriage two days after traipsing down the aisle. Anyone who takes their marriage seriously knows that it’s based on a whole lot more than just gender. It’s based on love and affection, trust and support. And it’s based on two people who are dedicated to sharing their lives together.

If two men or two women find that all-too-rare special someone in each other, then I say bravo; true love and happiness don’t happen enough in this day and age. But Bush and the GOP have bent over backwards to make gay marriage into a cultural Waterloo, that “traditional families” (whatever they are) will somehow be damaged if two men or two women are allowed to get married.

Now, I can’t pretend to know how strong Bush’s marriage is, or the marriages of any of the GOPers leading this particular charge, but I have to wonder how strong they can possibly be if they can be threatened by two people of whom they’ve never heard getting married. It brings to mind a scenario of a Grant Wood-ish farm couple, looking sadly at each other over the kitchen table. “Maw,” the husband says gloomily, “them queers is gettin’ married over at the town hall. Looks like this is it for us. You keep the cow, I’ll keep the pig.”

This is, of course, complete twaddle. No one’s marriage will be affected in the slightest if two men or two women get hitched, and from the widespread public yawning over the Republicans’ latest attempt to turn Americans against each other, quite a lot of people already know that.

And when you think about it, after months of bloviating, nobody has really explained just how gay marriage would “undermine” or otherwise harm marriage as a whole. It seems the Republicans are simply exploiting people’s tendencies to fear anything unfamiliar.

The only votes the GOP will get out of trying to demonize gays and lesbians will be the ones they had in the first place. After all, does anyone really believe that someone who says that “sodomites” will burn in hell would vote Democratic? To the rest of us, such blatant pandering to intolerance and hatred reveals an ideology firmly rooted in the politics of fear. The Republicans really should quit while they still can.