Top 10 Ways Gay Marriage Harms Straight People

California is abuzz over same-sex marriage, as gay marriers swarm the Golden State like so many Castro-ized killer bees in case ruddy-faced values voters kill our buzz with November's constitutional amendment. There's so much to discuss before Melissa Etheridge releases an album of wedding music; before anyone splurges on Palm Springs real estate in anticipation of the gay honeymoon boom; and before some groom is asked, "Do you take this twink...?"

Things are supposed to be legal unless someone can claim to be harmed by them. All sides in the gay marriage scrimmage fight have had the misfortune to argue in courts of law whether someone, anyone, is or is not harmed when gays wed. If our system were truly about what harms, we would promptly legalize currently illegal things that are harmless -- gay marriage, pot, and Mexicans. Then we would criminalize currently legal things that are harmful -- nuclear weapons, Hummers, and the Gypsy Kings.

Since at the moment the gay marriage foes seem quaint and creepy, and will surely lose the whole shebang sooner or later, and in America everyone deserves a fair fight, I offer my Top Ten Ways Gay Marriage Harms Straight People, to level the playing field:

1. Slippery slope to ballot measure making gay marriage mandatory.
2. Lesbian divorce court proceedings occupy all family court dockets for the next five thousand years.
3. Gay marriage robs the right of their beloved bogeyman, leaving them to sound the alarm only over intelligent design, flag pins, and anal probes.
4. Heterosexual bachelor parties finally exposed as the homoerotic, desperate feint at debauchery they've always been, because "gay bachelor party" is redundant.
5. "Bridal registries" re-named "Nuptial registries," leading registry companies to go bankrupt buying new stationary.
6. Catholic Church collapses due to mass defection of clergy to marry, and thus the "Father of the Bride" and the bride could be one person.
7. Someone could get seriously maimed when bridezilla is also a bear leather daddy.
8. Gay marriage slippery slope leads inexorably to the extinction of the human race, because gays don't breed, marriage equality entices everyone to be gay, and ipso facto within fifty years there won't be enough humans to populate the moon, defend against an invasion of killer space robots, or watch the Miley Cyrus Silver Anniversary Tour. What? They do breed? Well, never mind.
9. Christian Right ashamed of forever titillating themselves with breathless mouthing of the phrase "slippery slope" while imagining conservative columnist George Will slathered in maple syrup wearing a thong.
10. Heterosexual marriage is subjected to free market competition, driving down its value and price. Normal cost of wedding rings drops from three months' salary, to two, eventually to a barter for a menthol cigarette. Mass abandonment of marriage by straight people. Impoverished and lovesick heterosexuals forced to illegally cross the border to Mexico to have back alley straight marriages with Oaxacan migrant workers. The apocalypse ensues.

Any attorney or publicist working on behalf of groups such as Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, or the Gay-Hating Pinched Scrotum League should feel free to borrow these pithy arguments for any legal brief, as the situation dictates.