Maggie Gets one Wrong
I will admit, I don't know who this Maggie Gallagher* is who wrote this silly commentary called "Bush Gets One Right", but she's clearly a little red toady and, unfortunately, she got it wrong.
Perhaps if I were red myself and she blue, I would jump up and down and point and shout "she's wrong! she's wrong!", but I'm not like that.
She believes, with the president, that the thin but sturdy dike (NB, not "dyke") holding back the flood waters of gay marriage is the evidence, which surely must be mounting even as I type, that children do "better" (whatever that might be construed to mean in their little red minds) if they have the "traditional" one-man + one-woman parental infrastructure.
Well, that's rubbish and they know it, as they are finding out but continue to deny. But that's not really my point at this point anyway. Instead, I found myself laughing aloud and slapping my thighs at this assertion of Maggie's as she finishes driving the nail in the gay-marriage coffin with her lofty tones:
All over the world, for most of human history, marriage has been about connecting men and women in the only kind of sexual union that can both create the next generation and connect those babies to their own mother and father.
This is about the only fun we blue-minded types get to have with dark-red fundamentalists: sitting back and giving them time to play out enough rope to hang themselves with. Doesn't Maggie realize, yet, that if she keeps insisting that it's the force of a "tradition" — universally recognized! — that calls for marriage to be only man + woman = kids and is keeping marriage "pure", it's going to be difficult to move away from that silliness with any sensibility left when even she has to abandon her denials in the face of the overwhelmingly obvious?
There are simply too many examples of "marriage" throughout history that have not been "traditional" by any stretch of the imagination, or for the purpose of producing children (including all those entertaining non-"traditional" stories in the fundamentalists' own book of myths) for anyone credibly to continue to believe what Maggie claims to believe — not to mention the current president.
*Note added 22 February 2005:
Now I do, thanks today to a note in a piece by Terry M. Neal, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer: "Maggie Gallagher, the syndicated columnist who had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to promote a pro-marriage initiative…." Is it remarkable that my first impressions were so accurate?