Dammit, Mozilla just crashed my machine and I lost the first half of a post on Marriage Protection Week that I started last night.

So here's my best reconstruction:

I'm a marriage professional. The state of Colorado says so. And as a marriage professional, let me assure you of this: The one thing that marriages really do need protection from is married people.

People in marriages manage to commit all sorts of idiocy, injury, and outright thuggish cruelty on one another thanks to their ideas about what marriage is and should be. There's very little people can do to one another that hurts more than a marriage gone bad in one direction or another. Married people cheat, lie, steal, play power games, stop having sex, have children in a failed attempt to save the marrage, drift apart, emotionally batter, walk out, humiliate, antagonize, brutalize, murder, rape, sabotage, take advantage of each other, and make one another literally or figuratively crazy. Religious married people blatantly ignore every tenet of their alleged religion in order to misbehave in their marrages, while secular humanists heap contempt on each others' humanity.

The marriage scientists have done all kinds of research about toxic conflict styles, predictors of divorce, and theories of marital failure. Shockingly, not one of them mentions "the desire by people to have a non-traditional union" or "social ambivalence about the sanctity of marriage" as a risk factor. I'll bet all the money I have that not a single marriage therapist has ever had a couple show up in his or her office saying "we're having trouble in our marriage because of the gays." People complain about the same things over and over: they can't handle money together, they can't have sex together, they can't handle conflict together, they can't parent children together. Those four categories cover about 98% of all couples who show up in a therapist's office.

Despite the atrocities committed in the name of marriage, married people are happier than singles. Married people are more productive workers. Married people get sick less often (and are more likely to be covered by health insurance when they do). Children in married homes are less likely to live in poverty, or to go to school hungry. The MPW'ers want to have it both ways: "Marriage is Good" and "Marriage Should Be Limited." If marriage is good, we need more of it, not less. If we need less marriage because it's too dangerous to let everyone have it, more barriers need to be raised.

Because while the moralists grouse about how easy it is to get divorced, the truth is that even in an amenable divorce, it's hardly a matter of "yawn... we're so bored with each other... well, see ya!" The realities of mutual property and mutual debt and children and pets and etc. etc. makes even a "simple" divorce about 100 times more complex than a marriage.

But it's easy as hell to get married, provided you pick a single person of the "correct" gender. Unlike immigration marriages, which are assumed to be a sham unless proven to be legit, civil marriages are presumed legit unless proven otherwise. Met someone in front of the courthouse 10 minutes ago? Go get a license and have it signed, bang you're married. I got married too young, and the boi even younger. I've seen too many couples who've married too young. I've seen couples who don't know how to be individual people, and individual people who don't know how to be couples. We teach nothing, either formally or culturally, about how to really DO marriage in a functional way; everything the average couple knows about marriage when they get ready to walk down the aisle is a pastiche of fantasies, anecdotes, and outright lies.

Arguments about the alleged sacredness of marriage arean exercise in selective attention and self-delusion. If the preachers really want marriage to be a sacrament, let's call off the practice of secular marriage at once. All people who aren't religious and who don't get married in a church, you now aren't married. And then the establishement clause will invoke, and the equal protection clause, and we'll be forced to come up with a way of declaring people legally partnered that makes use solely of the civil system without all the religious baggage. Oh, and at the same time all people who are still "married" by this point? You have no legal ties or obligations or protections formery associated with "marriage" because it's now solely a religious practice. If you want all those goodies, you have to go have the civil whosis whatsis and if you don't, you don't.

Marriage hasn't been destroyed by outside forces. It's been rotten from within since the dawn of civilization; it's just now that the worm is showing its head. I do my best to put back together individual marriages and to teach people how to think about their partnerships in a way that fits with their ethical and moral framework and honors the humanity of their partners. But "Marriage Protection Week" isn't going to make my job one iota any easier, nor is it going to improve the lives of a single person currently living on this earth. You have my guarantee as an expert on that.

* edited to add: please feel free to link back here without having to ask. I appreciate the vote of confidence.