In honor of the 2015 Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, an essay from 2009:
Vermont’s historic legislative affirmation of gay marriage is a beautiful thing. But that doesn’t stop me from rolling my eyes. That we debate the appropriateness of the heart’s elemental impulse to join with one’s beloved suggests just how young we are in the scheme of human evolution. Heck, a turnip should be able to marry a basketball, if such an act increases the world’s love supply.
Now there’s a dangerous possibility.
What if boosting the planet’s woo-woo quotient were indeed the criterion to marry––or, more significantly, to stay married. Given our nation’s divorce rate (50 percent, give or take), a whole bunch of us might not make the cut.
Just as we renew our driver’s license, we and our spouse would have our heart’s union assayed every so often. Don’t laugh, we have the technology. Check the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, or the 2009 TV drama “Lie to Me”. And if we’re not generating good vibrations, our marriage license is suspended til we wise up.
