Okay Ms. Tucker, you get props for that
CULTURAL CHANGE IS AT THE HEART OF MARRIAGE'S DECLINE
Sun Jul 18,11:02 PM ET
By Cynthia Tucker
It wasn't even close. The U.S. Senate easily shut down debate last week over a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Democrats were joined by a handful of Republicans -- including Arizona's John McCain -- who remember the cornerstone of conservatism: Government has no business regulating citizens' private lives. As McCain put it, the amendment "strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans."
With that ugly business behind us, perhaps it will be possible now to have a legitimate discussion about the dire state of heterosexual marriage. People of goodwill -- those of all faiths and those with none -- ought to be able to dispense with the lies and illogic that have poisoned the debate so that we can concentrate on the changed cultural expectations that bedevil modern marriage.
The two-career couple; the wife who earns more than her husband; disagreements over religion, money and child-rearing; old-fashioned adultery and betrayal -- those are the challenges that confront contemporary couples. Not to mention a destabilizing factor embedded in 21st-century romance -- the idealized Hollywood marriage, which gives young couples a false premise on which to base a lifetime pledge. (As a divorcee, I know something about the dilemmas that doom so many heterosexual marriages.)
As commonplace as those problems are, you haven't heard much about them in the debate over "saving" traditional unions. Instead, narrow-minded preachers and pandering politicians have propagated a lot of foolish notions; among the most foolish is the idea of a connection between the faltering state of traditional marriage and the growing movement for gay rights. Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears and Trista and Ryan -- who married in a televised ceremony after she spent a few weeks culling him from a herd of unattached males on a so-called reality show -- have contributed to the decline of heterosexual marriage. Gays and lesbians have had nothing to do with it.
