The very last wedding I attended was in the Spring.  It was at a lovely church in the small town of the bride’s mother; rather small, old, dignified, with pleasant smell of well cared for wood and plush carpet, all bathed liquid light from stain glass windows.  The church, I mean.  The bride’s mother was my age, entering late youth                       .

 

Perhaps one hundred people in their suits and tasteful dresses, spaced evenly in the rows, little children at their best behavior.  Flowers.  The minister and his associates were at the altar, and they turned and faced the crowd.  The organ started up and the procession of the wedding party began.  All hell broke loose, and what had been a respectful and quiet moment of great supposed spirituality became a circus.

 

A great ‘swish’ occurred as the contents of each row spun around and coagulated near the aisle.  Everyone had a camera, most with flashes.  Several had power feeds so over and above the music you had the buzz-click of these cameras.  Stalking up and down the outside aisles were two hired photographers snapping away.  At one point I was asked to smile.  I didn’t. 

 

So in this house of God, at the magic moments leading to a melding of spirits and dynasties, a Photo Op occurred, with all members of the party knowing how to give the small half smile towards the camera and look stalwart and young or demure and lovely as gender required.   After all were assembled near the altar, the music wound down and the clicking ceased.  Pretty much, anyway.

 

All through the service – this one with personally written vows that were simply too nauseating to repeat, believe, or condone, intertwined with traditional text, but we’ll let that pass – clicks and flashes went off, the minister growing somewhat annoyed, but only because it threw off his timing rather than demonstrated a lack of actual reverence for the moment, and even so he broke into big smiles at the end and looked towards the press……sorry, the family.  Actually, into the cameras, but we’ll call it the family. 

 

The clergy shouldn’t be picked on unnecessarily nowadays.  Several of them are not pedophiles or sexual predators or institutional gays protecting their own.  Is that harsh?  The Catholic Church in this country admits nearly 5% of its priests for 50 years were sexual predators.  Admitted, and this from an entity not known for being forthright about its institutional failings. 

 

Further, given the bishops were hiding the criminal priests (why?) by shifting them around, isn’t it reasonable to suspect that this has been going on for awhile and that the bishops represent in telling proportion the same number of offenders?  And this, just the Catholics.  Given the number of summer camp horrors run by Protestant churches that appear reluctantly in newspapers with the same reliability of South American bus plunges and with as many lines of type, plus Boy Scout scandals (the Scouts were formed in England by a known pedophile) and setting aside Mormon underage rape and marriage, a fair question might be asked: is Christianity safe for children?  What parent would send a child to spend hour with adults with only a 5% number of likely pedophiles in various stages of denial or recovery?  Quite a few, apparently, despite their often own poor, shuttered away experiences.

 

Maybe I’m being over sensitive.  Maybe the shutterbugs are showing an appropriate amount of disdain for the church.  They don’t think they are, but who am I to judge?

 

As the groom and bride turned to face their family, another blaze of light as flashes went off, and during the recessional, all decorum went out the window as would be art students scrambled for angles and hundreds of dollars of film was burned.  Well, probably significant numbers of the cameras were digital; certainly the video recorders that were set on tripods at favorable locations, recording everything, were.

 

Yes, no flashes were allowed, and nobody apparently cared.  After all, should churches have bouncers?

 

I’m an atheist, and yet I cannot recall being more offended and, well, ashamed than I was at that service and at many others previous and since.  If it’s a House of God, and since most everyone there professed their allegiance to deity, shouldn’t they, you know, act like it?  Somehow treat His House as different and an object of respect?  Is it necessary that every bloody moment, including spiritual moments, be recorded?  I felt it rather appropriate that the only professed atheist in the family was the only one who showed any regard for the church and what it was or wasn’t.  It really irritates me, especially when I am also the only known Democrat and (separately and coincidently) declared hedonist in my known gene pool, that I’m also apparently the only one who has high regard for the delights and charms of fallible memory alone.  And that I was the only one offended by disrespect for ceremony in which I alone did not believe.  Dissonance.

 

It can be even worse.

 

I can recall a couple – several couples of my acquaintance – who recorded the sexual act that resulted in pregnancy, so that each and every squeal and drop that went into creation of their child’s life is recorded for …….what, exactly?  Who?  Who is going to watch or listen or would want to watch or listen to their parents bonking away to create them, supposedly in love and lust but just as surely performing for the camera in an act of supreme vanity?  I never saw or listened to such – my face can be expressive at moments of concern – but usually these were mentioned, laughably, as a possible inclusion in a proposed evening of video watching.  

 

But a wedding is different, isn’t it?  It’s a unique, special moment that should be documented for eternity, like your high school prom or perhaps, if wealthy or pretending to be, a debutante cotillion.   You know.  Important.  Really, really important.

 

Horseshit.  Over half of the marriages in this nation end in divorce.  Far more just end and the parties engage in a contest of durability as they look forward to outliving the other, engaging in affairs or gardening or some silliness to conceal this fact from social peers and, of course, the children. 

 

Oh, horseshit again.  They stay together for tax reasons and fear or ridicule; fear of having a member of their peer group scoop up their spouse, ridicule for being undesired themselves when back on the market.  Nobody suffers more for this supposed parental dedication than the very children staying together was supposed to help.

 

There are exceptions…..

 

Weddings, even church weddings, have become little more than Extortion Festivals, Spiritual Photo Ops, and each unlikely couple knows it is almost certainly guaranteed that they will not cross the bar in later life as a married couple, at least to each other.  They have to know that.  They cannot be so stupid.

 

And so, in that regard, it’s perfectly in keeping with what is actually being done, that the sanctity of the church ceremony is violated even as it is being pointlessly recorded for eternity for children to look at again when they arrive at breeding age and plan their own ‘special day!’  What grotesque hypocrisy.  What a travesty. 

 

It’s been pointed out that gay couples who have recently gotten married are more likely than most of the hetero couples to stay together.  After all, they’ve often stayed together years before they were sorta/kinda allowed to get married in selected cities, counties, hamlets around these United States.

 

Conservatives, having discovered - or admitted - that they produce as many gay creatures as the liberals, have decided to applaud civil unions rather than marriage in order that the trashing of the illogical institution be reserved for unions of two genders and not one.  That way, they can pretend……..well, I don’t know, actually.  Perhaps to them marriage is just civil union plus clergy and a delighted god, whereas a mere civil union isn’t.

 

Comes down to it, it’s simply the insertion of two words for one, for the law does not breakdown marriage in degrees.  A civil marriage by a drunken judge in Vegas is as valid as a seven day ceremony at St. Peter’s, consecrated by the College of Cardinals and God himself.   Worse, a common law marriage by written declaration is equally valid as well.  You’re either married or not, and no degrees of that estate exist.

 

But why does the Law give a damn whatsoever?  Really, what business does law, and therefore government, have validating romance or love? 

 

It doesn’t, of course.   But primarily and historically, because it wanted royal bloodlines clear and so that primogeniture would be uncontested and valid for property ownership for lesser mortals, government got into the habit of validating marriage, which was nothing more than the diagramming of human breeding.

 

Coincidently, of course, because property had to be owned by someone - and it was best if that ownership was clear - everything simply became the husband’s, including the woman, less the purchase price to the wife’s family.  His property.  In the early days, Catholic priests in the tradition of Hebrew forebears also married, but the Church was uneasy about the rights of widows to a husband’s property, which could be construed as a percentage of church wealth.  Hence: abstinence and no more civil suits against the Holy See, wives, risk of wives, or any of that truck. 

 

The sleazy avarice of the Church and its descendent spiritual franchises transferred itself easily enough to democratic America, and marriage was a way to cement a melding of dynasties, rich and poor, and when it was noticed that married men – and then married women – tended to have more responsibility and voted, panders were made in their direction, and ‘parents’ became the biggest and most selfish lobby group in our history.  But even potential parents, mere married people, tended to vote as well, and so two singles with no intent of having children just about always pay less taxes as a couple than as singles.  This works to appease those who want to corral all into a large baptism and marriage blender of grateful voters.  The establishment.

 

But in recent years, over-population coupled with an arisen sense of sexual freedom in women and men both has confounded those in the establishment.  There is no reason for tax breaks for people who are married without children, and if children arrive, the tax breaks ought to go directly to the protection of the innocent, not to the selfish parents with no guidance as to for whom it should be spent.  But……kids don’t vote.

 

So, we now thrill to the inflated social pages of newspapers where, along with photos of the usual horse-faced female and her obese, gap-mouthed fiancé gazing past each other’s revolting features into opposite middle distances, we now have bearded, mustached and nearly always balding men embracing or cheek to cheek combined with selections of bull dykes and willowy anteaters doing the same.  I cannot say the addition of gay weddings or publicly announced committed relationships or divorces will be any more nauseous than what already exists.

 

I don’t know if gay weddings and subsequent events will entail more digital recordings or if emotionally arrested adults will yearn to review the exact moment when they became married by viewing the tapes again and again.  I suspect so, and in rough proportion to what has gone previous.  I don’t think it matters, myself, because they surely cannot display more lack of actual respect and belief than heterosexual establishment types already inflict upon their god and our shared heritage.

 

Further, I doubt that gay marriages will be any more or less successful than heterosexuals’, or their weddings any more tasteless and grotesque than that of most straight weddings, or that they will show less respect for the religious totems they claim to worship, or spit upon the vows they have no actual intention of keeping or even believe possible to keep.

 

And yet, I’m against gay marriage as I am to just about all straight marriage. 

 

I see no purpose for a separate legal status for people based on their romantic lives, which are just about always delusional.  If people want to grant medical, personal, child custody or whatever rights to someone else by a legal contract, hey, that’s all that should be needed by hospitals, schools, whatever.  They shouldn’t have to insist they’re in love or spiritually conjoined to prove it.  And they shouldn’t be granted tax benefits because of it unless there are children. 

 

A boilerplate civil contract or a civil union ought to be all that a state requires before children come under care of the couple, and that contract should require both parties to be equally responsible for the children, whatever happens.  You are, after all, going into business with someone, the child being the product.  Not sure about that?  Then, don’t have the kids, by sex, adoption, Petri dish.

 

Is that marriage?   Is that the  Cinderella/Snow White romance that so many women -  and men - are brought up to long for and inexplicably so many expect?  Marriage can be whatever you think it is, but to have children OR to receive tax benefits for those children, you have to have that civil contract.  If you wish to increase your public commitment before God or Divine Micro-wave, that’s up to you and your beliefs.  But leave us out of it.  Or, at least, your part of it, and you can expect the same from me.

 

Government has no standing in romance.  It shouldn’t, anyway.

 

If there is a difference between ‘civil union’ and ‘marriage’ you probably note the distinctions because one has the adjective ‘civil’ appended.  It’s fair to distinguish between civil and spiritual (a concept with which I am not at home), and marriage is apparently both while a civil union is not.  There is not any legal difference that I can see absent issues involving children.

 

Conservatives don’t want gays in charge of children – not at home, school, church - apparently because they’ll raise them as gay.  A zero percent amount of evidence of that danger has done little to change this.  Further, the FBI might have evidence as to which is a statistically safer environment for the children of straight parents: one run by one of the mainstream Gay/Lesbian groups or one run by a church of your choice.  If so, wish they would provide it.  Parents and we who care so much about children, being American, would want and need to know.  It isn’t provided, probably because there are no camps for kids run by gay groups, which makes sense, but thought I’d just toss that in.

 

How about this.

 

Government has no reason to care if two willing adults of either gender or combination live together and engage in sexual relations.  It should neither punish nor reward either of the parties by tax benefit or penalty.  It is indifferent.  A standard contract of civil union can be obtained either by roommates of convenience or lovers to cover power of attorney and medical issues.  It can be one page of boilerplate or infused with contract riders that take the place of prenuptial contracts.  It covers the issue of possible children, how they would be raised and paid for and who has parental rights over them.

 

To this point, government has no abiding interest in any part of this, but the contract is filed to make it legal and binding.

 

If the partners wish to get married, they may do so at any time as willing adults.  A marriage is considered a spiritual union, an area of absolutely no interest to government.  People may get married without a civil contract, but it has no legal standing and changes no otherwise intact laws of inheritance or parentage or guardianship.

 

If children appear, the partners notify the government and tax benefits kick in.  They are one hundred percent for the first child of issue from a woman to the age of twelve.  That’s to say, primogeniture to the max.  Anything spent on the child is subtracted from taxable income.  A second child gets fifty percent.  All others grant has no financial benefit to the parents.  This is to discourage children for the sake of children or bragging rights to the male and for the health of most women.  And it’s for the kids.

 

This will, I suspect, mean that marriages will be more private, more personal, more rare, and even if often utilized in conjunction with the civil union of contract, be able to serve another purpose.  The civil union is the one of celebration, goodies, and the reception.  The marriage, being spiritual, takes place where it would be most meaningful to the couple, and special to them alone. 

 

So many women look upon all this as mere fodder for future conversations with other women, and men don’t value it much at all.  Confronted with their own disinterest in a spiritual moment that doesn’t serve any show biz capacity, doesn’t require others to be present to applaud their love, and in reverence to a deity with whom most have - at best - only a nodding, pretend acquaintance, marriage might fade away altogether. 

 

Good.  Institutionalized hypocrisy is the one abortion all gods hate.