Blog For Arizona

FMA: Farsically Mendacious Amendment

Bush's pet culture war project this election cycle is the Federal Marriage Amendment. A perfect vehicle for every 'family values' politician to take a principled stand against the realities of modernity. This simple fact is, if you are trying to save the 'traditional' nuclear family, which has historically been anything but the norm in the vast majority of civilizations for most of human history, that cat has already left the bag.

America is no longer capable of having man+woman+2.5 children=family as the norm. The legal and economic emancipation of women has gone too far. Women will never give up their independence, and woe betide anyone who tries to take anything away from them. The mores and dictates of religious marriage receive far more lip, than service, even from those whose lips are raw from kissing their Scriptures. Even places where 'covenant' marriage (which disallows no-fault divorce) is available, like AZ, such marriages are less than 1% of marriages performed. That homosexuals want access to the solemnization of marriage should cheer traditionalists, not enrage them. Their demands for inclusion are a reflection of the great legal and economic benefits we have heaped upon marriage, the cultural status conferred upon marriage even by those outside the mainstream, and the innate strength and utility of a pairbond for raising children. Making marriage available to any two people, regardless of their status, will ultimately strengthen the institution, allowing it to wheather the storms of modernity.

The biggest open secret of the FMA is that it hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of passing. The super majority needed to get it out of Congress just isn't there, let alone the votes to pass 3/4 of the State legislatures. Bush is only dangling it as a convenient way to present politically cheap red meat to his Conservative base. The FMA is as much a hypocritical joke as one of Bush's other favored Amendements: the Balanced Budget Amendment. Sometimes one wishes that these GOP blowhards would get what they ask for; perhaps then we wouldn't be staggering under some of the largest deficits in our history. If the GOP are as true to the ideals of the FMA as they have been to the Balanced Budget Amendment, look for them all to divorce their wives in a mass televised ceremony on the Mall, make their children wards of the state, and live in sin with a series of cheap floosies, the maintenance of whom will be made tax deductable, of course.

posted by Michael Bryan @ 3/13/2004 02:27:00 PM