God Hates Unmarried Losers
It's BushCo's $1.5 bil plan to let the homophobic Christian Right dictate love. Whee!
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 16, 2004
©2004 SF Gate

Man, those inner-city poor people sure are dumb.

Just look at 'em, popping out babies like crazy and draining the welfare system like there's no tomorrow, all while remaining completely unable to either get or stay married in their sad, un-Christian, gangsta-rap lives. Pathetic.

And oh my God, those damnable gays. Would you just look at them, fighting for basic human rights, whining about wanting to get married, as if they knew anything about God's manly, flag-waving, 100 percent heterosexual love?

Clearly it's some sort of flaming pagan sorcery those gays used to persuade all those misguided states to suddenly begin to offer more and more rights to gay couples, granting civil unions and nearly full benefits and allowing them to copulate and hold hands in public and sodomize each other with strange phallic-shaped devices in the privacy of their own homes, even in Texas.

I mean, what the hell is the world coming to? And what, pray tell, is a self-righteous, homophobic, God-thumping, conservative administration that constantly kowtows to the preening Christian Right to do about all this?

Why, hurl $1.5 billion of your tax dollars at the problem, that's what. Educate them dumb poor people on how to fly right and learn more "interpersonal skills" so they can get married -- you know, just like their much happier and more heavily narcotized, sanctimonious, Botoxed, Zolofted, blank-eyed Republican masters -- er, fellow citizens.

And, hey, if that $1.5 bil happens to reinforce the inviolable God-approved mega-sanctity of all-American ultra-hetero man-woman marriage, if it shows those icky gay people a thing or two about what this country truly values, all while appeasing a perpetually terrified right-wing contingent of BushCo voters, why, all the better.

This, then, is the plan: $1.5 billion to promote "healthy marriages," especially among the lower-income plebes, with the ulterior motive of bashing gays yet again, all newly spawned from the bowels of BushCo to assuage the ever-irritated Christian Right.

You remember them? The masses that are, apparently, incessantly nagging BushCo to get in there and do something to protect the sanctity of marriage before it all falls apart and their straight white gay-hating God up and abandons them entirely and we become a nation of body-pierced single-parent sodomites who read The New York Times and drive Volvos.

Look. This is not a completely hideous idea. You want to help people learn to love more deeply and stay together and deal with their personal issues? You want to educate folks about the value of honest communication and of raising healthy happy kids? Wonderful. I'm all for it.

Here's what you do: Teach them to shun political agenda and hollow religious doctrine and become more self-defined and open and spiritually kaleidoscopic humans.

Teach them to be free to define love and family and human relationship in as raw and intimate and uniquely divine a way as possible. This is what you do. And, oh, yes, teach them to ignore the living hell out of the dishonest Christian Right.

And, oh, those "interpersonal skills." Say it like you mean it. Say it like you believe they have any idea what the hell they're talking about. Say it like it doesn't somehow imply that neocons actually believe the problem with these damn poor people and their damn poor relationships is that they just don't know how to talk better and suck up to Jesus and quit shooting each other over all them illegal drugs.

Hey, $1.5 billion should buy a lot of interpersonal skills. It should pay for a great many notions of how love is this deep potent chaotic impossibly difficult but worthwhile thing, with marriage as one of its more fascinating and culturally applauded expressions. Right?

Or maybe not. Maybe the voices of the Christian Right mean something entirely different. Maybe they mean all those happy hetero marriages we all see every day. You know the ones.

Like when two people, one of whom is a ditzy slut-wanna-be celeb, get totally loaded on vodka slammers and run off to Vegas and get hitched in a puerile drunken haze, only to have it annulled 55 hours later in an embarrassing bout of ugly Hollywood PR. Is that a good sanctified hetero marriage? Oh no wait, that can't be right.

Maybe matrimony is all about sad-looking white Christian people gathering together in overlit studio audiences to bewail, in "Chicken Soup for the Suburban Soul" style, their desperate lack of sex and physical contact and decent stemware, with Dr. Phil looking all furrowed as we all just ignore the 50 percent divorce rate, including all those straight happy Christians. Wait, no, that can't be it, either.

Or maybe "healthy" marriage is when your miserable GOP wife stays home and raises the disgruntled kids and keeps her big trap shut like a good wife should, and, as a reward, she gets all the Botox and therapy and Nordstrom shopping sprees your credit card can handle. Yes. That must be it. Isn't that right, senator?

Interesting, really, how difficult it is to track down one pure example of a healthy and beautiful and communicative Christian marriage -- isn't it, Dubya? We could ask Laura, but it looks like she's busy being a nice GOP token wife, smiling that perpetual wooden-mannequin smile off in a corner somewhere, reading books to baffled children, harmless as a sterile bunny.

Here's a hard flick of the finger into the forehead of GOP sanctimony: Marriage has nothing to do with God. Marriage has nothing to do with Christian "interpersonal skills." Marriage has nothing to do with how one colon-clenched segment of the power elite decides it must restrict matrimony lest it lose more control and become increasingly insignificant and tumble further down the slope into hot pools of rage and intolerance and bad sex once a year with the lights off.

And, finally, marriage has nothing to do with political attitudes or party affiliation or how big your right-wing campaign contribution was during the last election, and therefore how much you get to shove your personal pseudo-pious homophobic missionary-position ethos down the nation's throat.

Because marriage is, of course, about connection. It is about social ritual and new, wide-open definitions of family and the ability of two people to commit to going deep and peeling each other back and agreeing to deal with each other's crap for the next 50 years.

Marriage is, in truth, just one weird messy culturally endorsed facet of the massive, overarching, impossibly powerful love impulse that fuels, engorges and enrages the entire species at all times and in all places across the entire known and unknown universe. Simple, really.

And guess what? You cannot legislate that force. You cannot stop its various mutations and progressions in our culture, and its absolute insistence on forcing our bewildered species to evolve, despite itself.

Such a force laughs in the face of $1.5 billion attempts to slap some sort of hissy little right-wing agenda on it. Such a force laughs in the face of anything that tries to limit its delicious, kaleidoscopic progress.

And, really, shouldn't the rest of us do the same?