Rocky and Bullwinkle Predicted the Future of America

It happened on every show, when Rocky and Bullwinkle did their little patter-dialogue:

"Bullwinkle: Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.
Rocky: Again?
Bullwinkle: Presto!
Lion: ROAR!!!
Bullwinkle: Oops, wrong hat.

Instead of a docile rabbit, a viscious lion, tiger, rhinocerous, or something-such would scream out of the top-hat and Bullwinkle would quickly stuff it back down.

Wrong hat. Well, that depends now, doesn't it?

The hat is what's the matter with Kansas, so to speak.

This is how the game goes down. The "rabbit" intended to spring from the hat is protection of the fabric of society. Sure. That's the ticket.

"The attack on marriage by rogue judges and renegade public officials has congealed a coalition of evangelicals, Catholics, Muslims and Jews to defend marriage by seeking passage of a federal marriage amendment."

Hmmm. Well, not to pick the Catholics, let's just start there by noting that they have a divorce rate of 21%.

"A recent study by the Barna Research Group throws extreme doubt on these estimates. Barna released the results of their poll about divorce on 1999-DEC-21. 1 They had interviewed 3,854 adults from the 48 contiguous states. The margin of error is within 2 percentage points. The survey found:

11% of the adult population is currently divorced.
25% of adults have had at least one divorce during their lifetime.
Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significently higher than for other faith groups, and for Atheists and Agnostics."

Interesting. Since they cannot even legally marry in most places, I am sure that the "divorce rate," so-to-speak, among gays and lesbians is probably statistically zero.

I will let a bit of this second letter speak for me, but first I must call attention to the fact that both the above LTTE and this one occured on the same editorial page on the same day, as counterpoint. Remarkable, compared to the many days, as noted by becca, when they just spray-pepper readers with multiple slime-blankets of similar rotting viewpoint.

"The Constitution is supposed to grant rights to all Americans. It should not now be used as a vehicle to restrict and diminish the rights of Americans. A constitutional amendment that bans gay marriage changes the fundamental role that our Constitution is designed to play."

So Bush intends to dazzle his audience by pulling a rabbit out of a hat, thereby producing a constituional amendment to discriminate against gays. Of course this is doomed to fail.

Any assertion that "marriage is between a man and a woman" is ultimately derived from religion. There's no civil reason to assert this. That's reason number one why such an amendment will not succeed. It's establishment.

Of course there are churches that will marry gays and lesbians. But the civil benefits unfortunately do not proceed from these ceremonies. If religious freedom is really at the core if this, then the marriage-protection antagonists must dispense with their hypocrisy and allow civil recognition of all church marriages, even gay ones.

But they won't.

The second reason such an amendment must fail is the Constitution itself, which makes amending it very difficult, especially for issues that do not have super-majority support.

But, the whole idea is for the issue to fail anyways. Then it's win-win for Bush. He gets to pull yet another bait-and-switch on his base of religious strangers. Instead of a rabbit, a lion pops out of the hat: another tax cut for Paris Hilton! That's his intention all along.

And when the amendment fails, the base gets to go (again) into its oh-aren't-we-so-persecuted-by-popular-culture mode. They eat that shit up. It rallies them. And it works almost every time.

Bush is our Fearless Leader, and we're Pottsylvania now.

"Fearless Leader: What does Pottsylvania have more than any other country? Mean! We have more mean than any other country in Europe! We must export mean."

No doubt.