Great Blogs o' fire!

http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/

by the author of Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

An excerpt from her blog:

How Banning Gay Marriage Will Destroy the Family
I didn’t plan to write about marriage again so soon, but here it is, the issue of the week, overshadowing Haditha, immigration, the Indonesian earthquake, global warming, and Brangelina’s new baby.

Someone has to say it: A constitutional amendment banning gay marriage will destroy the American family and all the sex-related “values” our brethren on the religious right hold so dear. And it will do so by creating an irresistible demand for a constitutional amendment banning heterosexual marriage.

The logic is clear. Since the Supreme Court ruled, in Lawrence v. Texas, that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional, it’s legal for gays to have sex. Add to that a ban on gay marriage and you will create a special class of people – gays and lesbians – who are free to have all the sex they want, as long as it’s outside of marriage.

This is bound to lead to grumbling among the heterosexual population, even a certain amount of gay-envy. Heterosexuals will start saying: “How come we’re supposed to get married if we want to have sex? How come homosexuals get all the breaks?”

True, most of the demand for a constitutional amendment banning straight marriage will come from the commitment-phobic 18-36 year old male demographic, but this happens to be the most influential demographic in the land. Their tastes determine what movies are made, what we see on TV, and whether we can find sneakers that don’t look like rubberized platform shoes. If the 18-36 year old male demographic demands a ban on heterosexual marriage, you can bet that the right-leaning politicians will change their tune faster than you can say “Dick Cheney’s daughter.”

Instead of bashing gays for their insidious “lifestyle,” the politicians will start beating up on them for their “special privileges” – the right to party all night until well into your fifties, the right to blow off a partner as soon as he or she starts carping about closet space, and so on. Straight young men will tire of trying to pass as gay as soon as the conversation turns to children. They’ll run into the streets shouting, “Freedom from marriage for all!”

And if a ban on gay marriage doesn’t succeed in actually destroying the American family, it will certainly do a great deal to annoy the American family. Face it, there are no “heterosexual families” or “gay families.” Any extended family that doesn’t contain at least one gay couple just hasn’t extended itself very far. There are gays and gay couples caring for elderly, usually straight, parents or children, and gays who bring the green bean casserole to mixed sexual-orientation Thanksgivings. In short, gays are already embedded in “the American family,” and anyone who messes with them is messing with that noble institution.

Families have a stake in marriage if only because it’s an occasion for a wedding, meaning a chance to dress up, drink too much, and flirt with your cousin’s ex-husband. If gays can’t marry, that’s one less wedding per extended family, and that, I say, is too high a price to pay.

You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend, the economist Julianne Malveaux, says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved