Sanctity of Marriage

Yesterday the cable news channels were all about the former gradeschool teacher who, having finished her lengthy prison sentence, has married the boy (now man) with whom she had had an "affair" when she was his sixth grade teacher. Now, can we finally stop talking once and for all about the goddamn "sanctity of marriage"?

There are millions of liberals out there who, like me, support the idea of gay marriage and are appalled at the push for an amendment banning gay marriage by the religious right. But where are we in this debate right now, when the amendment is coming up for a vote in the Senate? We sit smugly on the sidelines, confident that the amendment will fail. We want the issue to just go away for strategic reasons - it's a distraction from the issues like Iraq and corruption that might bring Democrats victory in November. Perhaps this is why liberal activist groups have been silent during the debate. MoveOn, for example, has no campaign ongoing to pressure Senators to vote against the amendment. Meanwhile, conservative groups like Focus on the Family are bombarding Senators with millions of astroturf letters and emails. And that's not all - they're working at the state level - in states like Pennsylvania - to get anti-gay marriage amendments on the ballot.

Where are all the liberals? I'm afraid that one day we're going to wake up and find a ban on gay marriage enshrined in law, and we'll kick ourselves for not standing up when it would have mattered. It's true that the federal amendment will not pass this week. But this is not the goal of the Focus on the Family types - they want to smoke out and punish those who oppose the amendment, lay down a litmus test for future Senate candidates, pave the way for a victory five, ten years from now. We ignore them at our peril.

By the way, need I point out the intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-gay marriage position? Take the ads that Focus on the Family is currently running against Senator Ken Salazar (D-Colorado), for example. In the ads they phrase the issue in stark terms: "Why does Senator Salazar believe that children do not need a mother and father?" Of course, if they seriously thought that was the issue, Focus on the Family would be pushing for an amendment that outlaws divorce, outlaws adoption by single people, takes custody away from single parents, and requires remarriage after a spouses death. But of course FOTF's concern is not for children who do not have both a father and mother. FOTF's concern is to stick it to the fags. As Jerry Falwell (or was it Pat Robertson) informed us, fags were responsible for Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks. Protesters at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq tell us that, yes, fags are to blame for their deaths. Where is the liberal politician who will stand up against the bigotry?