The Hideous Truth Behind the FMA

Tomorrow, the President is expected to make statements in support of the "Federal Marriage Amendment" (FMA). The timing of this newfound interest in the issue is indicative of a wholly transparent hurling of raw meat at his religious rightwing base--a callous, opportunitistic, purely political ploy to pump up his approval rating as we head into the serious stretch of mid-term election campaigns--but that's what politicians do, the President is a politician, and he's never given us any reason to expect any better of him.

I oppose the FMA. Not only because I'm gay, but because it's a truly evil concept. I'm not using hyperbole here. The idea is pure evil...and I'll explain why.

When you take out the religious arguments for banning gay marriage (which I assume the Constitution still requires, but who knows these days), the remaining rationale boils down to "It's important to defend the traditional definition of marriage in order to protect the traditional family unit."

Deconstructing that a bit, we can eliminate any serious arguments that the Constitution should be amended to defend "tradition" for tradition's sake. If anything, the Constitution is designed to facilitate evolutions of traditions toward a more perfect, more equal union. When FMA advocates point to the long history of one-man--one-woman marriages (pushing aside polygamist models, fiercely patriarchal models, and the evolutions of no-fault divorce, for convenience), I tend to remind them that until less than 100 years ago, mankind had enjoyed an equally long tradition of denying women the right to vote where voting was a right men had. How old a tradition is does not reflect how righteous it is.

So, taking out tradition, we're left with a rationale that boils down to "It's important to defend the current definition of marriage in order to protect the family unit." But that's where FMA advocates typically stop. They don't exactly spell out what the current model of marriage is designed to protect the family unit from. It's implied that there's some universally understood threat, but no one defines it.

Let me.

I've had the occassion to push one or two brilliant conservative thinkers a bit further on this topic on political blogs, and where we always end up in doing so is at the idea that without a strong institution of marriage to control them, far many more heterosexual men (than currently do so) would not stay with and/or provide for their children and their mother. That's the threat of weakening the institution of marriage (not that I agree that allowing gays to marry would do so, quite the opposite, but that's a thread for another day). What FMA advocates fear, even if they don't say so in so many words, is that left to their own devices, many more straight men would follow their baser instincts and move from woman to woman, abandoning the families they created in their wake. The societal pressure to stay with one woman and work as a unit to provide for her and their children is needed to control such men. The conservative point of view appears to be that anything that weakens the institution will create more broken families, because heterosexual men can't be trusted to do the right thing without that kind of pressure. That's the hideous truth behind the FMA.

In other words, homosexuals are being scapegoated in order to maintain this societal pressure on these irresponsible men. A minority of Americans will have their second-class citizenship chiseled into the nation's most important document because conservatives fear rampant heterosexual promiscuity. It would be pathetic if it weren't just so damn evil.

I don't think President Bush is wise enough to have thought this through to this conclusion. I think he's merely throwing Dobson and his ilk something to chew on so they'll rally round Republicans and be the dutiful little pitbulls they are moving toward November. But in doing so he's feeding the homophobes and their blind hatred. He's making the country less hospitable, indeed more dangerous, for me and mine.

It's still early, I know, but so far there's been no plague of locusts or flowing rivers of blood in Massachusetts. No spike in the divorce rate among heterosexuals. No reason whatsoever to believe the fearmongers who preach that gay marriage will impact that institutions in negative ways. But more telling than that, Bush knows he doesn't have the votes in the Senate to pass the FMA. He's merely beating up on gays and their families so Dobson will again turn churches into GOP election headquarters. He's purposely scapegoating us, and as dim as he appears to be, he surely understands at least that much. Again, it's pure evil and he should know that his great-grandchildren's generation will surely be ashamed of him for doing this.