Where's The Love?

On the night of the November 2008 election, California voters restored the ban on gay marriage and closed the opportunity for same-sex unions. That twang you heard was the sound of the collective undergarments of the Religious Right, snapping into a knot to guard their tight little sphincters in the wake of their election victory. “Gay marriage”, we were told, “Is an assault on traditional marriage”. It’s fair to ask just why these religious zealots hold traditional marriage in such high esteem.

The path to traditional marriage involves something called the great American courtship, a ritual that yields the highest out-of-wedlock birth rate on the planet. Here, natural hormone-induced urges are compounded by a lack of sex education, unfamiliarity with birth control, and totally useless abstinence pledges— all courtesy of (you guessed it) the Religious Right. And then, once the traditional couple gets around to tying the knot, the statistics working against them are formidable. In today's America, 43% of all first marriages end in divorce. The failure rate for second marriages is 65%, and for those who believe that three strikes and you're out, they're right 75% of the time. Three quarters of all third marriages fail. When the numbers are aggregated, the divorce rate in America is 52%. It's the highest divorce rate for any nation or culture in the world by quite a wide margin. And the road to divorce can be cruel indeed, for public health statistics tell us that 17% of all wives suffer some level of spousal abuse.

It's no better for the children. Anybody who has taught in public school for more than 25 years will tell you, without exception, that students have diminished in their behavior, their work ethic, their respect for authority, and their overall learning ability. And this diminution has built upon itself incrementally, year by year, until American youth is now the most poorly educated in the industrialized world. The reason behind this decline is that fathers and mothers have abdicated their parental responsibility and left it up to the school system to tend to the upbringing of their children. Mothers no longer consider it a pleasure to dish up a hot meal for the kids, with the result that an astounding number of students get all three meals on weekdays from their school. And if parents are blessed with a high-energy child, they would prefer to medicate the kid with Ritalin rather than use good parenting skills to focus and develop the child's energy.

The California vote which went against gay marriage had received lavish funding from the Mormon Church. This, of course, is the self-righteous theology that believes that if one heterosexual marriage is good, more is better, so we have the Mormon phenomenon of "plural marriage." While exercising their religious faith, some offshoot Mormons begin turning their daughters into sex slaves at age 13 or 14, and for the next few years the young girls are bred like canine bitches in a puppy mill. They eventually grow up into clone-like women who appear on television as brain-dead Stepford wives with their lifeless zombie eyes peering out under Victorian hairstyles. It ain't pretty, but it's, sure enough, heterosexual, and I guess that makes it traditional.

So here's my question. When it comes to the debasement of traditional marriage, and the ruination of the American family, what can gay marriage possibly do that hasn't already been done? And could someone please tell where there's any love to be found in all of this?