It's been a ghastly week for heterosexual married couples.
My wife (one woman) and I (one man) have just completed forty-nine years of marriage. Until Tuesday, when the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, we had meant to celebrate the date with a couple of very good friends. We had even started planning to mark our Golden Anniversary next year with a blowout party for 600 of our closest friends plus our two children and their families from Brooklyn and LA.
Now all those plans have been wrecked. How can we celebrate our Golden Anniversary when the Supreme Court of these United States has just made a grotesque mockery of marriage itself?
This sort of question never dents the brains of those who say that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry. They claim instead that legalizing same-sex marriage does no INJURY to heterosexual couples, that it doesn't hurt us in any way. But I'm here to tell you that my wife and I are now in pain. Deep pain. Heartbreak. We had no 49th anniversary dinner this week, and there will be no party for our Golden Anniversary. On the contrary, we will spend the date separately mourning for an institution that has survived for thousands of years, but has now been killed by a single, brutal, unconscionably reckless decision.
You may wonder how such a decision could kill any institution that has somehow withstood a divorce rate near 50 percent. But even though Christ emphatically forbade divorce -- "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mark 10:9) -- it has long been allowed by all Christian sects including the Catholic church, which officially forbids divorce but routinely allows "annulments" -- even of marriages that have lasted many years and produced several children. Consequently, while only about half of all married couples stay together for life, as marriage vows traditionally require, the breakup of their unions does no harm at all to the stability of marriage. It's strictly a matter of numbers. While a divorce rate of 50 percent leaves the institution intact, a gay marriage rate of as little as 5 percent can destroy it. That's how insidious gay marriage is.
Equally insidious is the argument that gays deserve equality. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy strikes down DOMA because it denies "the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment." But gays are no more equal to straights than homophobically righteous conservatives are to leftist nuts. For that reason, gay "marriage" will never equal traditional marriage.
This decision puts us on a bullet train to chaos. The next thing you know, dogs will marry cats, mice will marry rats, and -- worst of all -- Democrats will marry Republicans. (Any theologian will tell you that the so-called "marriage" of James Carville and Mary Matalin violates natural law as well as the laws of God.)
And please don't ask me to cheer for Edith Windsor, who brought the case against DOMA because she would otherwise have had to pay $363,053 in estate taxes on what she inherited from her same-sex spouse. That figure is FAR less than my wife and I will now have to pay to reconstruct our house.
Because we can no longer live together but cannot bear to leave the house, we will have to build a brick wall right down the middle of it. Just to get permission for this arrangement in our neighborhood will cost us -- in legal fees -- at least fifty grand. Then the house itself must be reconfigured. On her side of the new wall, she'll need a new Jacuzzi, a new kitchen, and a new living room; on my side I'll need a new exercise room, a new dining room, and a new stairway. Since no builder we know has ever done this kind of job before, we've so far had only ballpark estimates STARTING at 1.3 million.
And guess how far we'd get if we took OUR case to the Supreme Court.