We need a Defense of Sanity Constitutional Amendment

I must say something about Bush's defense of marriage constitutional amendment. I have read the proposed language; I have listened to a few minutes of Sam Brownback (R,Kans) on the Senate floor; I have fought off a wave of nausea. Brownback, a loyal White House ally on most obsessions of the loony right, spent his time talking about the relative superiority of two-parent households versue one-parent households. Income levels, emotional stability, iPods per capita -- all better in the intact family. Children seem to thrive, for the most part. Well, not entirely, Sam admitted. There are problems everywhere. But even Sam was forced to admit that his dazzling array of three-color charts and bar graphs seemed oddly wide of the mark. We are talking, after all, about homosexual marriage. The relative fortunes of children living in heterosexual marriages in various stages of disarray does not seem...what would Sam the lawyer say? Dispositive?

But it is, you see. More charts about what's going on in the Netherlands, where those relentless social experimenters have smoked themselves into such a state that just talking about the legality of same sex marriage has had a disastrous effect on the marriage rate. The Dutch aren't getting hitched, they're living in casual, Bohemian arrangements, and their kids - well, he didn't say anything about Dutch kids. Nor did he mention that the social phenomenon he was describing which is so different from, well - Kansas, is actually increasingly prevalent in European countries in general, France, for example, or in Italy, which is in some danger of becoming entirely unpopulated as the result of plummeting birthrates.

But Brownback's argument is a two-stepper which requires a mind as nimble, or at least as weird, as Senator Sam's. The Dutch experience proves that once you let gays get married, straights don't want to do it anymore. It's just, I don't know, ruined for them. And if they (Americans, now, try to follow along) continue to have kids while not marrying, it must follow that increasing numbers of American children will fall into chasms of poverty, despair, and emotional trauma.

This is what passes for argument on the floor of the Senate these days. We've got to ban gay marriage to avoid the Dutch Dilemma of Dissolution, a bacchanal of pot-smokin' and non-marryin' Netherlands Nihilism.

I prefer this argument to the polemic of reductio ad absurdum trotted out last time, that failing to "define" marriage will result in Equal Protection lawsuits contending that Americans must be free to marry their pet salamander, or that Fido should be allowed into the intensive care unit when his beloved wife-human is in extremis. The loss of interest argument is superior to those positions. Still very, very stupid, but better. There might, after all, be other reasons that Western Civilization (which would exclude Kansas, of course, and most of America) is fast losing interest in marriage. Indeed, there may be no way to legislate it back into existence. The Senate may not know that, but as the Pond-Dweller pointed out once before, the Senate is not exactly hip to current social trends. They may not have noticed that fewer than 25% of all Americans currently live in a traditional nuclear family. The nukular family, indeed, has undergone a sustained fission reaction. Americans may not share their obsession about gay marriage because Americans aren't that interested in marriage in general, particularly the young. In fact, that youthful cohort, America's future, would probably be indifferent even to salamander-human marriages. I mean, if you think it can work. Maybe that's what we need: The Give It A Shot Amendment.