Marriage Hypocrisy

In recent years, social conservatives like the guy who's still president have pushed the tautologous notion that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. This statement is much like the Founding Fathers saying that slaves are the property of their owners, or male lawmakers of the 19th century saying that women don't have the right to vote. Yes, marriage is a union between a man and a woman — because you, the people in power, continue to keep it that way.

But the times, they are a-changing. First Vermont enacted civil unions, then the Massachusetts statehouse legalized gay marriage, then the California Supreme Court held that a law denying gay people the right to marry was unconstitutional, then the new governor of New York said his state would start legally recognizing gay marriages from other states. Young people are so far ahead of their leaders on this issue, it's embarrassing. As my generation grows older, gay marriage will cease being an issue and instead become a nationwide reality.

As if we needed another reminder that Republicans are horribly out of touch with the youth vote, a pair of senators have taken up the fight against civil rights once again, by pushing a constitutional amendment that would enact into law that tautology I mentioned earlier. Here's where reality gets stranger than fiction, though, and where social conservatives really need to learn to recognize irony. The senators co-sponsoring the amendment are (drumroll, please): David Vitter of Louisiana and Larry Craig of Idaho. Last year, Vitter got named as the most famous client of the late DC Madam's prostitution ring, and Craig was infamously caught by police, most likely soliciting gay sex in a Minnesota airport. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Being gay, that is.)

Hello! These married fools are the guys social conservatives put forward to defend marriage? What a joke.

On the bright side, a constitutional amendment denying marriage rights to gay people has no chance of going anywhere. This nation has a hard enough time amending the Constitution to enact civil rights, let alone to stifle them. As with the fight against slavery and the women's suffrage movement, states led the charge, allowing black people to live free (the northern states, pre-Civil War) and granting women the legal right to vote (in the case of Wyoming, 1869) long before a constitutional amendment accomplishing the same goal was passed. In the case of gay marriage, states are leading the charge — but in the opposite direction of the proposed amendment. Vitter and Craig are hypocrites, pandering to what we can only hope is an increasingly skeptical social conservative base. These two senators have no credibility to lecture Americans — straight or gay — on the sanctity of marriage. Rather, their time would be better spent tending to their own lives, which have no doubt been thrown into tumult by their sad, very public embarrassments. If Larry Craig and David Vitter truly cared about family values, that's exactly what they'd do.