By Maria Padhila
The recent blog entry on dick size resulted in a lot of frank discussion, but I think we managed to skirt one important issue: Which country has the best enormous phallic symbol? My vote is above.
I started wondering when I saw a funny bit of absurdist theater broadcast from a Republican presidential candidate’s camp this week. Oh, I know, there are so many — funny bits of theater as well as Republican candidates. But this one showed the GOP’s concern with people’s relationships to national monuments. Candidate Michele Bachmann’s campaign manager pretty much said gay marriage and polyamory are like having a relationship with the Eiffel Tower. It should really be seen to be believed. In the clip, Bachmann’s Iowa campaign co-chair Tamara Scott says that indeed, with gay marriage progressing, the worst fears of the right wing are already coming to pass: people are practicing polygamy, polyamory, and getting married to the Eiffel Tower. (All this is in some way true, but my point is, so what?)
The funniest part is listening to her mispronounce “polyamory.” She gives it a cute little Dean Martin swing (heh heh): “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s poly-a-moooooor-eee.”
(By the way, the pizza pizza guy, Herman Cain, can’t seem to decide whether gay marriage is okay or not. This difficulty in choosing which side to be on is ironic, because he believes being gay is a ‘choice’. Mr. Cain, I have to ask: You want a job, right?)
The Eiffel Tower tactic is an extension of the slippery slope marriage argument for which another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, won fame and which eventually led to his being immortalized in the lexicon as a sex-related term. Santorum’s often-repeated assertion is that if you let two gay people get married, pretty soon people will be getting married to dogs, cats, geese (and they mate for life, people, for life!), aunts and nieces, as well as inanimate objects.
It’s not that I feel particularly oppressed or threatened by this nonsense. It’s more that I don’t like being lumped in with the dogs, cats and inanimate objects. Even though that video clip reminded me how much I really, really love Bow Wow Wow, I don’t want to marry them.
And I don’t presume to speak for them, but I do have the distinct impression that they don’t want to be lumped in with me, either. “All that drama, all those calendars, all that blah, blah, blah about compersion, it’s just a big drag and frankly kind of embarrassing to keep getting lumped in with the polyamorists,” I can practically hear the Eiffel Tower or the Chocolate Lab saying right now. “Those people never shut the fuck up.”
I have the same feeling when I get lumped in with certain humans, such as Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who calls being gay “evil” and told a woman she should give her child up for adoption rather than be a single parent.
What people do with their amour appears to put Bachmann into overdrive, despite or because of her husband’s ‘pray away the gay’ ‘clinic’ and speculation (which is sometimes creepily stereotype-based) that her husband is gay. The same speculation is hitting candidate Rick Perry, whose debate performances Gawker said are like “vintage Charles Nelson Reilly on a particularly engaging episode of Match Game.” See for yourself here.
This might point to a progressive obsession with who you love that is at least as strong as that of the Republicans. The difference is, in playing gotcha with these candidates, the aim is to catch them in hypocrisy, not simply in a dalliance. If one of them is gay and on the down low, it’s not just a matter of ‘character’, but one of policy.
But now, we must forget Paris, my cherie polyamour, and turn to Iowa, home of The Family Leader. It’s not my family or my leader, and, the organization also states, it’s “not a political party, not a candidate, and not a program.” Well, what the hell is it, then? A floor wax? A dessert topping? No, it’s “a Christ-centered organization that will lead with humility and service to strengthen and protect the family.” It is “loosely associated with Focus on the Family.” It also appears to have a political action committee. That’s practical.
The Family Leader put out a document called The Marriage Vow that’s one whiny mess. It’s a quasi-constitutional, pseudo-contractual, fake-official statement they’re trying to get politicians to sign. It starts like this, and it just gets worse:
“Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order — as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture, by Classical Philosophers, by Natural Law, and by the American Founders — upon which our concepts of Creator-endowed human rights, racial justice and gender equality all depend.”
Racial justice depends on monogamy? I’m even more confused than they say I am.
“Our exceptional and free society simply cannot endure without the transmission of personal virtue, from one generation to the next, by means of nurturing, nuclear families comprised of sexually-faithful husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.”
Translation: Grandmothers can’t teach history.
But let’s take a look at The Marriage Vow. From its assertively uppercase article to its fascinating blend of 19th and 21st-century evasive terminology (phrases such as “the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy” cheek by jowl with “inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds”), it’s a piece of work — one that rewards close textual analysis. I’d love it if you all could take a look and share your thoughts, after you’ve washed your eyes out.
The early version of the document professed that African-American children were better off under slavery than they are today. That got some bad publicity, but it didn’t stop Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum from signing it. Apparently they believe that is true, or maybe they think it’s not that important.
The new, improved, slavery-references-removed version follows its ‘preamble’ with a number of bullet points, including this:
“Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.”
I’d love to see that “overwhelming statistical evidence.”
On to more bullet points. Ok, blah blah, hate the gays, blah blah, hate single moms, blah blah, hate the Muslims, blah blah, and on down to the penultimate bullet point:
“Commitment to downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA’s $14.3 trillion public debt, its $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities, its $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and its $3.5 trillion federal budget.”
Wha–huh? That baby sure looks like an earmark to me. It’s just like Congress does it with those big pieces of legislation. You all just throw whatever shit you like in there, thinking we won’t notice that you slipped in a budget/big government line while we were all het up about you trying to take away our right to Practice The Lifestyle. (And practice, you know, makes perfect.)
What does that bullet point have to do with families? Whatever they want it to. Taxes is the killer of our families! Or was it the Gay that is the killer of our families? Or the taxes? Or the Gay? She’s my daughter! She’s my sister! Daughter! Sister! Never mind! Mitt can marry them both! Just sign! Sign!
Yes, Republican presidential candidates are very hot to sign this thing; Rick Perry did it last week. For people who profess to so deeply respect every vow, they sure take a lot of random ones. A GOP candidate just about needs a spreadsheet to keep straight all this vowing here, there and everywhere: “Okay, I agreed not to raise taxes on that one Pledge, then I said I’d make poor slackers pay more on the Contract, then I said I’d fight big government on the Vow, and then there’s the Pledge of Allegiance, and then that one about “help other people every day, especially those at home,” but does that conflict with the third bullet point on the Contract?”
My advice is you all need to slow down a little and make damn sure you know who’s handing you that pen before you sign anything. Could be… Satan.
Another thing that’s got me confused: If they sign The Marriage Vow, and they’re already married, doesn’t that make them a polygamist? Is this an example of marrying an object? When you sign The Marriage Vow, do you make a marriage vow to The Marriage Vow? Does it extend into an endless surreal echo chamber of “I signed The Marriage Vow, to uphold my marriage vow, when I made my marriage vow, vow, vow…”
Anything that needs that much reinforcement makes me suspicious. You protest too much. This is even more protesting than Occupy.
Plus: “Endless Surreal Echo Chamber” would be a good name for the next GOP debate.
But don’t miss the last bullet point: The victim clincher.
“Fierce defense of the First Amendment’s rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.”
You see, they’re the ones who are oppressed, hurt, imprisoned, not allowed to do or say what they want. They’re the victims.
I’m so moved, I’m fixing to start up a canned-goods drive for their poor souls. But I have to say, as long as we’ve got the gaydar guns out, that’s a pretty bold use of “fierce” by a bunch of alleged gay-haters. It even makes me a little suspicious. What if this document were actually part of a conspiracy by the other side? A plot to make the Christian right look so ridiculous that they would be entirely discredited?
No such luck. As with any reality show, there are too many people out there who take this shit seriously.
Thanks for response, Carrie–I was gettin a complex 😉
“You see, they’re the ones who are oppressed, hurt, imprisoned, not allowed to do or say what they want. They’re the victims.”
Oh don’t even get me started on THAT one. It boggles the mind that they feel this way when in my lifetime I have seen a reversal the likes of which has not been seen in a long time. My world went from people only discussing religion IF they were in the company of family or church-mates to people discussing it in the grocery check out line and at public school, end-of-year picnics.
It is especially awful now because those who do feel oppressed are the very ones who, while openly muttering or even saying “Jesus” on their lips in public places are also the very ones who will quietly ignore anyone who is not “of their church.” It is a form of marginalization that is devious, unacknowledged, and prevalent everywhere.
While I was growing up, NO ONE would ask my parents (or me for that matter) what church we attended but people in the line at the pharmacy will not only ask, they even have discussions assuming you DO attend a Christian church. This assumption of Christianity as the default way of being permeates every conversation.
It makes me sick that the Religious Right get such a huge and loud voice when their fundamentalism is in fact the minority in this country. Why has the media made it a point to give them so much unpaid-for attention? To what mercenary end?
These days, people who are not fundamental Christian walk on tip-toe….heaven forbid any of us have any candor because we might injure their precious, little, vulnerable, needy souls. Give me a break! Why DO we all hold back being ourselves so much around this scourge of love, freedom, compassion, caring, and sharing who call themselves “Christian” when in fact they have little in common with the avatar they are named for? Why do we protect them so much from being hoist on their own petard?
One of these days I am going to nicely let one of them know my thoughts. I will be respectful but truthful, honest and reasonable in the face of their own lack of reason.