And They Lived Gaily Ever After

Attempting to attract some additional votes in this election year, President Bush has decided to go out on a limb and endorse the idea of marriage. This is the kind of adventurous political initiative that could lay the groundwork for a slate of all the other things your mother always told you to do, such as getting the hair out of your eyes, standing up straight, changing your tone of voice when you talk to me and not leaving the house looking like that.

Under Bush’s plan, $1.5 billion would pay for training to help low-income couples “develop the interpersonal skills that sustain healthy marriages.” This despite the fact that some of the sickest marriages in history have been created and nurtured by high-income couples.

Some of this money would also be allotted to “the development of marriage promotion programs,” which might actually work if they gave every couple taking out a marriage license the chance to star in their own adorable reality show. But as for spending money on ad campaigns “to publicize the value of marriage,” it seems to me that if the combined pressures of family, church and society haven’t provided sufficient motivation for getting and staying married in the past, billboards probably won’t do the trick either.

Which brings us to the hidden agenda of Bush’s benign if probably futile initiative: to address the considerable pressure being applied by conservative religious organizations that would like Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. This, despite the fact that a high percentage of low-income couples in the gay community already have good interpersonal skills.

While Bush has gone on record as saying that marriage should be exclusive to only a man and a woman, it is not clear whether he is ready to risk alienating the segment of the voting public that might find the banning of gay marriage to be an essentially intolerant position. Especially when you stop to think that all the damning statistics involving the deterioration of marriage in this country have been provided courtesy of heterosexual couples. After all, it is heterosexuals who are responsible for the current 60% divorce rate. And of the other 40% that do stay married, it is wise not to make too many sweeping generalizations. I still remember a story I read in the paper about a woman who set fire to her husband of 35 years because he ate her chocolate Easter bunny, demonstrating nicely that sometimes longevity in a marriage is beside the point.

After all, our prisons and mental institutions are filled to capacity with adults who are the product of heterosexual marriages. Famous marriage offspring include Adolf Hitler, the Enron guys, the terrorists who engineered 9/11 and every serial killer of the 20th century.

And so it seems to me that if we are going to specify as inappropriate the unions of same-sex couples whose marital track records are untarnished, we ought to also include certain heterosexual unions that have, in the fullness of time, proved to be totally futile. For instance, the marriages of movie stars to anyone, straight or gay, especially if they have participated in a People magazine article in which they have declared that they were “very much in love.” Or weddings involving people under 28 who have known each other for less than a year and are intending to say their vows while wearing a parachute, scuba gear or anything else that celebrates their hobbies.

Statistically speaking, gay marriage stands alone as the last outpost of marriage’s most pristine ideals. Which is why I offer Bush this intriguing alternative proposal: Why not just give marriage to the gay community for the next five or six years and let them refurbish it the way they do run-down neighborhoods? Then once they have restored it to its original authentic beauty, plus added all the modern upgrades, heterosexuals can be permitted to return and continue their pattern of systematic debasement.

Emmy Award-winning humorist Merrill Markoe is the coauthor with Andy Prieboy of the forthcoming novel “The Psycho Ex Game” (Random House/Villard, June 2004).