Change the Guard

Inspired by what seems now to be weekly streams bearing disgraceful news on the front of America's debilitating fear of homosexuality, I'm proposing a bifurcated solution: One, we admit that the refined, domestic, self-righteous, and overtly didactic heterosexual project of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century has been a colossal failure; two, we make it illegal for heterosexuals to get married and instead only allow gays to wed. Those of whom are already married will be allotted six months to rubbish those vows and separate. Rings will be confiscated and promptly liquidated. Wedding dresses, may they enjoy their newfound form of burnt ashes. Pictures burned as well. If we could obliterate your memories of married life, we would. And when all of this is put together and simultaneously destroyed, we're going ritualistically dance and pirouette like bacchic pagans spurred by wine honoring the earth, lifting our feet off the dirt and throwing our ecstatic hands high, higher still into the sky while the giant conflagration sends up smoke signals to celebrate what we hope will be a landmark victory in the ongoing battle against stupidity.

Marriage statistics aren't glamorous, nor are they comforting. Divorce now appears to be a condition of marriage rather than a deleterious side-effect. And then, as if divorce were a pernicious disease that once established within a particular host persists somewhere inside the body's cells, the rates of divorce increase for those who've already had the pleasure of telling a lover to shove off. On some absurd level, the new American family seems to consist of at least two mothers and two fathers. This is why I have such a hard time swallowing the pill that conservatives and religious fanatics try to force down our throats that the "sanctity" of traditional marriage is under siege, that traditional marriage is being eroded by the malicious gays and their desire for their love to be recognized as equal to that of their straight counterparts, or in the recent Rhode Island case, their desire to have legal sovereignty to arrange funeral proceedings for a domestic partner's deceased love one. That's right; heterosexual marriage is being attacked by dead gays. Traditional marriage, the very idea of it, is nothing but a myth. Marriage has always changed as culture's have changed. There's nothing wrong with divorce. There's nothing wrong with deciding like two adults that at some point things stopped working the way they used to, but to do this and then to at the same time rail away from their lectern about the sacrosanct state of marriage and equate it with something along the lines of a private, inviolable club only open to a very certain privileged group of people is simply dishonest and grossly un-American; furthermore, it's cruel. And if we as a society can do one thing and one thing only, it's avoid cruelty to others at all costs.

If heterosexual marriage were a student, we would have flunked him years ago. We would have given him a few second and third chances, extra credit, tutoring, but ultimately we would have flunked and expelled the sorry patriarch for his shortsightedness. If this were the early 1940s we would have gripped him by the ear and slammed his hollow head against the chalkboard for being so fucking obtuse. Sorry heteros, you failed. You no longer deserve to be married. Had your rhetoric not been so inflammatory and your opinion of yourself not so haughty and moralistic, so deludedly off-base, we may have allowed for exceptions. But no. In addition to being dysfunctional in your attempts, you've also been enormous tyrants. The time has come to allow someone else a try.