It is hard to turn on cable news any more without having your senses assaulted by some ersatz conservative wailing like a bagpipe about the evils of gay marriage.
“We need to stop this from happening,” they say. “Marriage is one man and one woman. God-almighty Hisself said so.” And then there is the obligatory, nauseatingly redundant, “We need to protect the sanctity of the institution.”
Excuse me? The sanctity of the institution?
It makes me wonder if they have a rehab for this type of thinking.
Modern marriage, in case these Einsteins haven’t noticed, has all the sanctity of a ten dollar hooker. Matrimony has devolved into just another throwaway institution in a throwaway culture and it wasn‘t homosexuals that got us here. Nor will it be them that drives the final nail in the coffin.
As usual, we are not facilitating any real understanding with sound bites from talking heads. “One man and one woman,” no more illuminates the problems of modern marriage than nonsense like “my body, my choice,” illuminates the issue of abortion.
Worse yet, as any men’s rights advocate knows, marriage hasn’t been “one man and one woman” for a long time. The reality of the times is that men marry the state they live in. The woman just comes with the deal for a few years. When it’s fini with the woman, things really heat up with the state, shearing the man of his assets and adding a new, bizarre dimension to “till death do us part.”
And allowing gays into this fiasco is going to hurt the institution?
I wish I could corner a couple of these pundits and make them answer some questions. Maybe Hannity, or the anorexic looking chick with stringy bleached hair.
The questions would be simple. Where were you? And what are you doing about it now?
When the feminists pushed for and got no fault divorce, and the divorce rate consequently hit the stratosphere creating legions of dysfunctional, fatherless children, where were you? What are you doing about it now?
When feminist ideology spread like a malicious rumor though the media, academia, government and the culture, demonizing all things masculine and creating the fundamental rift between the sexes that plagues marriage to this day, where were you? What are you doing about it now?
When the family courts started taking Title IV-D money, turning benches into private fiefdoms, profit centers whose stock-in-trade became eviscerating the father-child bond, where were you? What are you doing about it now? And add to that another question. Do you even know what Title IV-D money is and how it makes it’s way from the federal government into family court coffers? Or would that take more information than you can squeeze in between Cialis commercials on Fox News?
Of course, the point is that we already know where these people were and where they are now. They’re in the place they have always been, crawling like roaches over every media news outlet that will call on them to say something profoundly meaningless about profoundly meaningless topics, in the name of plugging profoundly meaningless books.
These vultures want to protect the sanctity of marriage in the same way Courtney Love wants to protect chastity.
And those that caterwaul the loudest about the supposedly sinister prospect of gay marriage are the same ones that can’t stop wagging their tongues about the virtues of constitutional conservatism.
I’m fascinated by people that call themselves limited government conservatives, but sit by complacently like grinning, plastic bobble-heads, as long as the government is enforcing their religious and moral beliefs on the rest of the population.
News flash, that is not conservatism, it’s not even a cheap imitation. It’s theocracy. Ayatollah style. And it’s about as conducive to men’s rights as feminism.
I wouldn’t be bothered by this all that much if it were contained to media pinheads. I expect them to say a lot and understand little. It’s what they get rich doing.
But when I see MRA’s espousing this cause célèbre, it puts a spike in my “shoot-yourself-in-the-foot” detector.
Why, for the love of Pete, would men’s rights activists seek to protect the sanctity of an institution that is currently the most prolific source of oppressive discrimination against them?
But I see it all the time, from MRA’s, rather from patriarchs who think they are MRA’s.
Just as theocratic zealots shouldn’t confuse themselves with constitutional conservatives, patriarchs shouldn’t confuse themselves with MRA’s. In this writers opinion, our agendas are diametrically opposed.
Patriarchs want to return to the imagined days of chivalry and glory for men, when they were the heads of their homes and women did the dishes and pretty much anything else they were told. And I used the word imagined for a reason. The idea of days when men held all power and dominion over women never happened. It is just another in a long line of feminist delusions and revisionist history. It is a fantasy that modern patriarchs have swallowed, lending them to wax nostalgic about somebody else’s pipe dream. I’m sure it would be a nice world for the control obsessive, but that toothpaste, inasmuch as it never existed, is already out of the tube and is not going to be squeezed back in. And chivalry, in that it hinges on putting women first at the expense of men, has much more in common with feminism than it does with men’s rights.
MRA’s just want to escape the sexism and bias and treachery involved in marriage and every other institution that affects men. And that puts us, again in this writers opinion, in the ironic place of finishing what feminists started; an all out assault on marriage itself.
The feminists won this one. Game over. A shutout. What remains of marriage is not salvageable. It’s water that can’t be decontaminated; a cripple that can’t be healed. And the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery and start the whole shebang over from scratch. Hopefully that would be sometime after the culture has recovered from the damage of feminist doctrine and placed some sanity back on the table.
So if gay marriage erodes the sanctity of the institution, I say fine, let’s print them licenses by the truckload. I’ll spring for some rice.
There are plenty of real issues, the ones the pundits ignore, that need plenty of real attention. I won’t be bothered to invest in anything else, especially something that ultimately undermines men even more.
It was no doubt feminists that put marriage on life support. We should mourn that and look to the future for renewed hope that some day men and women will share life again with love and dignity. But today, MRA’s should do the decent thing with marriage and pull the plug
