My friend, like me, married young – at least by today’s standards. We are in our late forties. And our generation seems to be one in which women are making this decision in droves, turning the old stereotype of the male midlife crisis on its head, leaving behind hurt and often clueless husbands who are incredulous that this is happening to them.

It didn’t strike me till recently that eight of the ten divorces I’ve been aware of among my circle of friends and colleagues in the last five years have been initiated by women. In every case, these have been women with children who have been devoted to their families for years. None is wealthy, none is leaving on a caprice after which they reinvent themselves with cosmetic surgery and a convertible. And none is a pop-culture cougar, pursuing her own youth via a younger man in a new version of the classic life upheaval.

For all these women, divorce means that comfortable family homes in which they have lived for decades have to be sold, the material accoutrements of lives pruned and retooled to cram into an apartment with a daunting monthly rent. Many are struggling to bring old resumes into the 21st century digital job-seeker realm. Some have prepped in advance for this day, already lining up a couple of low-paying jobs – front office at their kids’ school, piano accompanist for the school choir – before taking the plunge.

Child custody is negotiated, usually jointly, and kids start shuttling back and forth between mom’s and dad’s new residences. And for the majority of these women who have not left their marriages for someone else, most will be facing singlehood as they approach or enter their fifties. There is the online dating realm to wade into some months later, with a steady stream of not-quite-right E-Harmony candidates to fit in dates with around the kids’ soccer games and prom dates and SAT tutoring sessions.

It’s not a very romantic picture.

Granted, while the situations I am pondering are anecdotal and each is distinct, I’ve done enough casual research since my surprising ‘discovery’ to identify a trend. It’s not just here in my Boulder, Colorado bubble that midlife women are the ones choosing to upend and move on.

Several years ago AARP magazine reported that the number of people ending marriages after 50 is increasing. Two-thirds of those divorces are requested by women. And, the article notes, while women do the walking, men don’t see it coming.

In 2008, Oprah.com ran an essay by Ellen Tien called “Confessions of a Semi-Happy Wife,” in which the author suggests her “Mid-Wife Crisis” is that of Everywoman stuck in a “thumpingly ordinary” marriage who yearns for freedom, novelty and alone time.

In “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in The Atlantic last summer of ending her 20-year marriage, garnering criticism for universalizing what some saw as a selfish, petty move to jettison a good guy (and dad). Yet she seems to speak for many women who look ahead to a second half of life in which they no longer wish to settle for tedium and mediocrity, even if it means venturing into a vast, unknown sea tossed with some frightening gales.

I remember asking my grandmother, as part of a college oral-history project, how it was that she and my grandpa had managed to stay married for 47 years, and her best friend across the street for nearly 50, when each had at least one child who had divorced.

“I don’t suppose we thought we had a choice,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

That’s clearly not the case today.  So what is going on?

I have a theory.

I call it the gender-generation gap. Here’s what happens: you start with a woman who’s a Gen-Xer or at the tail-end of the Boomers, who came of age in a rather heady era in which she imbibed feminist visions of possibility trumpeted by her predecessors, women who had burned bras and pushed ceilings, lobbied for daycare and flextime, hashed out a new vocabulary in which ‘head of household’ and ‘housewife’ were swapped for visions of ‘co-equal’ partnership.

The young men they married in the 1980s, however, weren’t reading advice for career girls or ‘how to have it all’ in Glamour magazine, let alone Gloria Steinem in Ms. The greater numbers of girls who had joined them in college classes was an added bonus, not a social trend to scrutinize. And when they went home on weekends, typically they re-entered a nest in which their needs were cared for by a traditional mom who fed them, kept them in new clothes, did their laundry and probably made their beds.

What we are seeing some 20 or 30 years later, I think, is a glaring gap in gendered expectations of what marriage would – and should – be.  The men who are husbands in their 40s and 50s today — despite being a decade into the 21st century, despite feminism existing in the minds of their children as a history-book relic, despite taken-for-granted rhetoric of equality – are grappling with a world framed by legions of June Cleaver moms – or at least Carol Brady — yet shared with wives who thought they’d be Claire Huxtable.

And when these wives realized, rather quickly after the kids came along, that TV show images were just that, most seemed to resign, buckle down, and get on with the task of getting babies raised and keeping a family in order. All that partnership stuff they expected? Even the best-intentioned husbands seemed to be good at “helping,” for which they are commended by their wives’ more traditional female friends, suggesting they not be taken for granted. These husbands were, after all, a good step more progressive than Ward Cleaver.

But 25 years down the track, it doesn’t seem to be enough. One thing these divorcing women friends of mine have in common is years spent begging their husbands for help in improving things. To listen to them. To divide duties and manage details. To summon empathy. To support their goals and passions. To take them seriously.

In virtually every case I’ve observed, when a woman finally files for divorce she believes she has exhausted all other possibilities for a life of meaning and satisfaction. By this point, her desire to save her marriage is over. She’s already moved on, when her husband is at long last just waking up, slammed out of inertia by this utterly unexpected step – even when she’s raised or threatened it before.

“I want a divorce” falls on male ears as inscrutably as if she had been speaking Estonian or Swahili.

Tien, who like Loh has reaped plenty of criticism for seeming to advocate leaving perfectly good, well-intended husbands, has this to say:

As one girlfriend remarked, it’s the age of rage — a period of high irritation that lasts roughly one to two decades. As a colleague e-mailed me, it’s the simmering underbelly of resentment, the 600-pound mosquito in the room…

In the beginning, we felt obliged to join the race to have it all; being married was an integral part of the contest and heaven forbid we should be disqualified. Flash-forward to 10 years later, when we discover that we can get it all but whose harebrained scheme was this anyway? We can get jobs, get pregnant, get it done. We can try — with varying levels of success — to get sleep, get fit, get control, and get those important Me-moments where one keeps a journal with thought-provoking lists that go ‘I’m a woman first, a mother second, a laundress third.’ We get upset, we get over it. What we don’t always get is: Why.

Conventional wisdom decrees that marriage takes work, but it doesn’t take work, it is work. It’s a job — intermittently fulfilling and annoying, with not enough vacation days. Divorce is a job too (with even fewer vacation days). It’s a matter of weighing your options.

For more and more women, it seems the option of chucking the drudgery of ‘tried and true’ for untried potential is a risk worth taking. Life isn’t over for women at 40 or 50 anymore; as Tien remarks, “We are still visually tolerable if not downright irresistible when we’re 30 or 35 or 40. If you believe the fashion magazines — which I devoutly do — even 50- and 60-year-olds are…pretty hot tickets.”

What worries me, though, is what sort of social legacy will be left by this growing heap of crumbled marriages. There is the inevitable splitting up of holidays at multiple parents’ and stepparents’ and then grandparents’ homes (for some kids – as was my case – parents don’t stop at just one divorce). There is the financial fallout. For every divorce, you’ve got families trying to get by on half (or less) of the resources that were once there, and almost twice the energy and environmental impact generated by dividing those material essentials into two households.

One of two things has to happen, I think, for marriage to revitalize its future and become appealing to women again. Either a current generation of young people needs to get in synch with their respective expectations for gender roles in a marriage, or marriage needs to be rethought and redefined, as Loh provocatively contends, to permit more autonomy and less demand for fidelity, if we’re talking how to sustain a 60- or even 70-year commitment.

As a mother of a 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, I am comfortably situated in one of those ‘stable, utilitarian’ marriages.  I worry about what lies ahead for my kids as they consider such a commitment one day. While I’d like to think my son will be a different sort of husband – a genuine partner, a true equal in all things domestic and relational – he is nonetheless being influenced by parents who fit the generalities I’ve outlined above: an aspiring, frustrated mom and a decent, hard-working, well-intentioned dad who nonetheless strives against the apron strings of his own traditional upbringing.

It distresses me that young men today still have visions of that gratifying lifestyle in which they go off to a great job and come home to a doting wife who makes their domestic realm an oasis. Researcher Barbara Kerr, who studies gender differences in gifted students, observed in a 2000 speech called Gender and Genius that most young people, even those with superior intelligence and higher goals, succumb to society’s conventional image of what constitutes achievement.

Kerr cites responses to a study she did on gifted students’ “perfect future day” fantasies, a favorite vision of what they might be doing in 10 years. I will quote her at length because the results are telling, and disconcerting:

A typical college male’s fantasy goes something like this: I wake up and get in my car — a really nice rebuilt ‘67 Mustang– and then I go to work, I think I’m some kind of a manager of a computer firm, and then I go home and when I get there, my wife is there at the door (she has a really nice figure) she has a drink for me, and she’s made a great meal. We watch TV or maybe play with the kids.’ Here is the typical college female’s fantasy: ‘I wake up and my husband and I get in our twin Jettas and I go to the law firm where I work, then after work, I go home and he’s pulling up in the driveway at the same time. We go in and have a glass of wine and we make an omelet together and eat by candlelight. Then the nanny brings the children in and we play with them till bedtime.’ What’s wrong with this picture?

Women dream of dual career bliss, while men still seem to nourish the hope that they might find a woman who wants to stay home and take care of them and the children. Despite extraordinary changes in the career expectations of women, many college men have yet to acknowledge the changes in gender roles that women’s expectations imply.

Kerr adds that “it is likely that even more men who publicly endorse equity in relationships secretly wish for a more traditional lifestyle. On the other hand, college women have as their goals romantic yet egalitarian relationships for which they have no roadmaps.” Just as their mothers did, who are now driving into a new wild blue yonder with no GPS.

How do we, as a culture, create these new roadmaps?  How do I teach my teenage son what it looks like to be a partner with women — and more importantly, to want to be?

Loh suggests we need to contemplate entirely new avenues, some that may verge into French (and other) territory in which the ideal of lifelong fidelity is put out to pasture to accommodate the vicissitudes of long relationships and the realities of day-to-day life that simply cannot sustain the romantic — and utterly unrealistic — demands we place on it.

One thing seems certain amidst all this uncertainty: now that women have a choice, marriage is going to have start adapting if it is going to survive.

I’ve been thinking with increasing irritation about that perennial conundrum-within-an-enigma-which-actually-isn’t-that-difficult-at-all: the separation of church and state, this time in the context of gay marriage. The issue becomes more annoying the more headspace I give it, and it’s not the prejudice or the public protests or the proclamations of any group on either side. The question that makes my brain twitch is this: why is this even an issue?

I firmly believe that the followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and/or vilify anyone they choose. I further believe that their right to express their group disapproval stops absolutely short of causing their chosen bugaboo any actual harm… as in, breaking the laws enacted by the larger secular state in order to protect all its citizens.  Those laws, we hope, evolve in specificity and efficacy as our understanding of what constitutes demonstrable societal or individual harm evolves as well. The American legal system has always possessed the power to control, modify or ban religious practices on these grounds: for example, in direct contradiction of Biblical precedent and many current religious beliefs, women are no longer owned by their husbands, twelve-year-old girls are off limits and public stoning for adultery has been replaced by Facebook flaming.

Another example: the general population, excluding certain Louisiana JOP’s, has eventually come to understand that a union between two people of differing overall skin pigmentation does not lead to apocalyptic plagues or children with multiple heads (also, that allowing humans to own other humans is a damaging economic construct, not to mention leading to some rather hard feelings in general). Had the original Southern Baptist Conference (and by “original,” I mean the SBC from 1845 until 1995) been able to retain a state-sanctioned grasp on the laws of the Southern states, slavery would still be legal, “miscegenation” would still be a crime and hundreds of thousands of lawn jockeys would still be on proud display across the land of Dixie. The Southern Baptist Conference was created to support these ideas: in defiance of the views of other Baptist congregations, but with the full support of Messieurs Leviticus and Nehemiah, to name only two. The Old Testament is all for concubines, slaves and massacres, but not intermarriage among tribes. Is this our best authority on human relations?

And what about the endless variations on marriage sanctioned by religions just as legitimate as Decent Christians Everywhere Inc? Why aren’t we respecting their traditions? Why are we letting widows remarry, those whores (Hinduism)? Why aren’t we letting Islamic American men who can afford it collect the four wives to whom they’re entitled? Who’s in charge here? The Founding Fathers, those whacked-out Deists, should have left us some instructions about which religion is right so we would know whose tenets to make law… oh. Wait. They did mention it. NONE OF THEM.

In a democratically-based society, the general idea is that we don’t let small groups dictate to everyone, in the belief that time, evolving understanding and the collective better judgment of a larger group of citizens usually works out better for everyone.  When small groups, or large groups, or individual states or Bible-beating rednecks do attempt to tar and feather someone, we can take their asses to courts which represent successively larger segments of the population and hope that somewhere along the line, better judgment and better education will prevail.

I don’t give a damn what happens in anyone’s church if the law isn’t being broken, if children aren’t being abused, if the Kool-Aid is untainted. And if a particular religious sect decided that I was by nature a lesser human being, I think I’d leave. Wait, make that I know I’d leave – that’s essentially why I don’t consider organized religion a tool that’s safe for most people to play with.  Any system of thought which approves and allows the dehumanization of certain other humans is risky stuff.

No religion owns marriage: the concept, the reality or the word itself. Religions have their own variations on the theme and every right to them. Marry (or don’t) anyone that you like (or hate (or sadly but firmly condemn)). Your religious definition, Ms. Christian or Mr. Sikh (and you do NOT want to go to the dictionary on this), is yours to live by. But please try to understand: pair-bonding predates religion; stable, wealth-creating, ably-parenting households are the true and demonstrable societal benefit of such bonds; and there’s not one iota of real evidence that a pair of the same gender doesn’t work just as well… and your talking shrubbery or flaming cow, while inspirational and possibly entirely real, is no excuse for ignoring science, history and simple justice.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford not only played fast and loose with the institution of marriage, but with email. However, help keeping affairs secret has arrived for not only politicians, but all of us. AshleyMadison.com just released apps for mobile phones and the Blackberry. Jeremy Caplan reports for Time that because they’re “loaded up from phones’ browsers, they leave no electronic trail.”

For those unfamiliar with it, AshleyMadison is a matchmaking service for married individuals. That’s right: It facilitates affairs. To summarize the statement of a woman Caplan quotes who consults in the online dating field, AshleyMadison is infidelity “rebranded” and made “monetizable.” Though Ashley Madison has signed up over one million users since going online in 2001, she seems concerned that it harms the online dating business for singles.

As has been noted, the Sanford case is unlike other Republican sex scandals. It’s devoid of sex with prostitutes (to which prominent Democrats, like Eliot Spitzer, are also prone), drooling over congressional pages, soliciting sex in a public rest room, or pursuing an aide’s wife. Sanford was simply a man who fell in love with another woman who wasn’t much younger than he.

As the spiritual counselor to the Sanfords and their circle, Warren Culbertson, said in a Huffington Post article:

. . . the only thing holding his friends’ marriage together right now is “their vow to God.”

“Because it’s not feelings — it’s not emotions. … For most Christians, at some point in your marriage, if you’re married long enough, you do it because that’s what we’re called to do — out of obedience instead of out of passion.”

You can almost hear the strains of a psaltery in the background. Apparently Sanford, despite his faith (not fundamentalist, actually, but Episcopal), was unable to adhere to a view of marriage as starkly medieval as Culbertson’s.

It’s not just religious principles, but romantic ideals about marriage — however strange bedfellows — that are stern taskmasters. Entering marriage, neither the man nor the woman typically understands each other’s sexuality. (Thus strengthening the case for gay marriage.)

Male needs are cyclic, like hunger or urination. Women, on the other hand, tend to be episodic. Not only don’t religion and romance acknowledge the problem this might pose, they make no provisions for when a partner (the aged aside) spurns sex entirely.

Causes most commonly cited include stress and fatigue. Compounding those, the partner suffering from one or both of those symptoms — at the risk of gender-typing, usually the wife — may resent the other for helping to cause them by not holding up his or her end of the chores or child-rearing.

Other reasons include — today especially — loss of self-respect if one loses job and, of course, weight gain. The husband blows up and turns off the wife or she packs on the pounds and no longer feels attractive.

Divorce may not be an alternative because resuming the solo life, especially with kids, isn’t feasible for most in today’s economy. Also, the person denied sex may still care deeply for his or her spouse.

Nevertheless, a life without physical intimacy is unthinkable for many. Is an affair the answer? Even if not sniffed out by the spouse, it may end the marriage. The unfaithful spouse may, a la Sanford, link up with the fabled “soul mate,” which seems to make abandoning one’s family understandable in the eyes of God. (Funny how those soul-mate sensations have a way of fading once the cheating spouse divorces and then marries his or her paramour.)

On the other hand, as hollow as married life becomes without intimacy, in lying and deception lay the path to true misery. Of course, like Sanford, the cheater can admit to the affair on the theory that confession is good for the soul. It’s just that any benefit that might accrue to the sinner comes at the expense of the one sinned against.

We invite our readers to respond to the following questions in the comments section:

• Is cheating a viable alternative to a sexless marriage?
• Do “emotional affairs” (which stop short of sex) help or make the situation worse?
• What’s the best way for the partner denied sex to deal with lack of physical intimacy in a marriage?

I’d like to be writing about clean energy or debating health care policy. I wish I could add something astute to the discussion about the future of democracy in Iran. But to do so would mean investing the time to follow these issues closely enough to have something worthwhile to add. And then there’s the time needed to actually write something. I’ve already got four or five unfinished posts languishing on my laptop.

Yet, in the words of my 14-year-old son this morning, who is angry at my asking him to pitch in around the house prior to the arrival of weekend guests, and who can’t understand why I won’t just drop everything to pick him up from the lake with his friends later today, I don’t have a “real job” — so why can’t I be like a good stay-at-home mom and craft my life exclusively around his? If I didn’t have work to play at, I could keep the house up by myself and still have time to provide unlimited taxi service. He can’t understand why, if Dad is a doctor, I still “have to work.” (Never mind that my husband is a family physician in a small, self-owned private practice in a very affluent community – which makes us solidly middle-class amid the wealth of Boulder). My son thinks I ask him to do too much in exchange for offering too little – at least in comparison to most of his friends, whose mothers are not so audacious as to work.

No doubt his barbed comment struck too sharp a chord in me. It is too often I who question whether I have a “real job.” I mostly freelance, as a copywriter and editor. This past year, it’s been full time, which is why I’ve had to shortchange this blog, despite the gratification it’s provided for me intellectually and as a really-wanna-be journalist. On top of that, I teach off and on as an adjunct at the University of Colorado, where I finished a Ph.D. over a decade ago. No, I don’t have a “normal job with an office,” as my son pointed out. Nor benefits. Despite protestations, I don’t even get an “exclusively mine” desk at home – everyone’s always encroaching on it. Unlike more highly esteemed grad school peers, I did not pursue a tenure-track position, since I did not see how it could possibly fit with the life I had by the time I graduated, with a toddler and an infant and a husband who was often on call and never gets home till 6:30 or 7:00.

As a high school political junkie I had a T-shirt that said “A woman’s place is in the House…and Senate.” I grew up in the heady feminist days of the 1970s believing that, and believing that I could be a success in the house (small “h”) and the public sphere as well. Both, I felt, were integral to the life I wanted to craft as a woman.

I’ve done my best to cobble together a sorry-looking version of “having it all,” which means a half-assed pseudo-career; a lot of guilt about being a mother who is only half there, half the time, for her children; a house that despite my best, often solo, efforts to keep semi-ordered, usually looks like a small tornado blew through – and a chronic level of stress and sleep deprivation, not to mention perpetual frustration over not being able to do any of what I do as well as I could have if I were more singularly devoted.

Why didn’t I get a full-time nanny so I could pursue the full-time career? Which, theoretically, I might make enough at (though likely not, as an academic or journalist) to afford a housekeeper to do all the scut work I resent? I didn’t, because I chose to be a mom, and I felt it was better for my kids if they had at least one parent available to them at more than just breakfast and bedtime. And since my husband makes substantially more money than I am able to, it makes sense for him to be the primary earner. But what I didn’t know, when I made that seemingly obvious choice back when to “do it all,” is how hard it would be, and how little valued I would feel on every front, not least in my own estimation. (And yes, I realize these are the quandaries of a privileged Western woman – but that is my culture.)

The struggles that American women – and we are still talking primarily about women — continue to face as they pursue a multiplicity of identities, particularly parent versus professional, are every bit as relevant, entrenched and seemingly insoluble as they were when I graduated from high school nearly three decades ago. My conclusion, almost 15 years into parenthood, 11 years post-Ph.D. and the entirety of that time spent negotiating the “juggling act,” is that little has changed for women. I bought that whole ‘80s bill of goods that you can have it all and do it all well, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a load of crap. The reality is, in the vast majority of situations, that as a woman today you still must foreground either family or work or suffer the fallout of trying to combine them.

My husband gets to leave the house every day and go to a job that, while taxing, is still gratifying and comes with a good measure of status. He doesn’t worry about whether there’ll be clean underwear for the next morning or (imagine!) whether the kids will have clean underwear. He doesn’t think about what they’ll eat for lunch or negotiate daily battles with them over fruits and vegetables versus pop and ice cream. He doesn’t have to interrupt his day multiple times to admonish them to turn off the TV or the computer and do something more productive, or summon the emotional energy necessary to brace for yet another conflict if he dares ask them to unload the dishwasher, vacuum the cat hair off the sofa, or wipe the splatter off the bathroom mirror. He doesn’t stress about how he’ll make his 5:00 deadline if he has to leave to go pick up his son who accuses his mother of being a “micromanager” if she has the gall to ask him to pin down what time his social occasion might wind up, so she can work around it – even though she doesn’t really “work,” in his youthful appraisal.

I’ve had well-meaning individuals give me two versions of advice. The more traditional set says, “This is just a season. The kids will be grown before you know it (they will – and that’s also why the attitude issues and constant conflict hurt so much); make them your focus, don’t worry about work – there’ll be time for that” — as if it’s just a little hobby. The others say, “Just don’t do it.” Let the house go. Let them worry about their own laundry. Let them eat as much junk as they please. Forgot about monitoring grades; it’s their future. Don’t worry if your husband’s parents get birthday cards or Christmas presents – it’s not up to you.

There is truth in both perspectives. But I can’t seem to embrace either. I remain torn in a maelstrom of expectations: to nurture these children I’ve brought into the world and to keep a semblance of domestic order, since I have this flexible schedule and work at home. And also to use this able brain I was born with, this analytical mind, this creative energy that, even if I were to try to subordinate, will not be repressed. Despite my son’s puzzlement, I don’t work because I “have to,” to make ends meet. I have a luxury in that regard (though he might not be skiing and traveling like his peers, were that not the case).

What I’m holding out for, I guess, is that it won’t be all over for me by the time I hit 50. Once my kids are off to college, my time-balance should shift. What I’m clinging to is the hope that society might have changed enough since the early days of feminism so that midlife women can make fresh, vital contributions and be rewarded for them with the pay and status they deserve, even if they’ve chosen, by default, the silly-sounding Mommy Track.

Am I a fool to have such faith? If the past 30-40 years of feminism’s limited accomplishments are any indicator, maybe so. As long as we live in a culture in which privileged 14-year-old boys see their mother’s choice to work as self-indulgent, progress seems elusive. But I’m also holding out hope that by making the choices I have – not to abandon my children, as so many in my generation were through divorce or neglect, and not to forsake my own gifts and goals – my son and his younger sister may grow up to see the value of both sets of commitments. Whether society will evolve to support women so that they can combine them more effectively is another matter.

Wendy Redal hopes to post more regularly in the future, with a focus on the politics of everyday culture.

He shouldn’t have, because he’s right.

Anyone who would support curtailing the civil rights of a minority group is un-American. Codifying discrimination in a state constitution or in the U.S. Constitution is un-American. And supporting people who aim to curtail civil rights and codify discrimination, as the LDS Church did with regard to Prop-8, is un-American.

And I’ll say this to anyone who supported Prop-8 – you acted un-American too.

…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone.  He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice.  He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.” He’s declared that those who do not believe in God should not be allowed to hold public office.

“Tone,” my well-toned ass. At the risk of reopening some delicate old rhetorical wounds, the difference between Warren and James Dobson/Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson is lipstick.

Oh, and he also believes that God wants us to whack Ahmadinejad. Good thing for him that Warren is a moderate, huh? Just imagine what a real conservative Christian would want to do to him.

So, what is Obama thinking here? Possibilities include:

1: The Uber-Unity Angle: I know Obama is hell-bent on being a man for ALL the people, ALL the time, regardless of whatever sorts of barking loonery they profess great faith in, and I’m sure this is part-and-parcel of his realpolitik theory about getting us past our partisan divisions. I’ve written before about the ways in which our power-elites have played us against each other, and I’m not a fan of artificial divisions. But at the same time, I don’t think we want everybody on the team – not unless they join on the right terms. There are people in America who don’t need to be courted or united, they need to be changed, and until this happens you’re inviting disaster.

2: The Strictly Personal Angle: Maybe Pastor Dan is right – maybe Barack just likes the guy. I don’t know that this makes me feel a whole lot better, but by the same token, no politician ever got elected by pandering to the likes of me.

3: The Use ‘Em and Lose ‘Em Angle: Perhaps Obama is just about tossing the fundagelicals a bone to make them feel like he’s representing them, too. If so, Warren doing an invocation is something I can live with as long as that’s all he’s doing. I won’t like it (listen, I’ve read the Constitution and Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, so to my understanding the word “God” should never occur in any remotely official legal context) but if this is the extent of Warren’s involvement in the next four to eight years of my life I suppose I’ll hold my nose and deal with it. But if this well-heeled neo-Puritan becomes an intimate consultant and policy driver I might not be quite as forgiving. Nor should you.

Whether it’s 1, 2, 3, all of the above or none, this is a bad move by Obama. You don’t effectively promote unity and progress by handing the show over to a guy who has offended every American with a working brain. So – off to a bad start. Maybe the change we can believe in comes later on the card.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an inauguration to plan for and I can’t find my Ouija board or my official Increase Mather prayer book anywhere….

James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, has come out strongly in support of Palin, even acknowledging that her addition to the ticket has moved him to renege on his former statement that he could not support John McCain as the Republican nominee. And while I agree with him — and with Barack Obama — that Bristol Palin’s plight shouldn’t be the subject of such intense public scrutiny, the disingenuousness in conservatives’ ardent embrace of Palin must be interrogated. Dobson’s organization is clearly in the camp that believes families are better off when mom stays at home. The section on motherhood on Focus on the Family’s website has links for stay-at-home moms, but few resources for working moms. And no such distinctions at all for dads.

Responding online to a reader who asked, “Is it important for mothers to stay home during the teen years?”, Dobson said, “Many will not agree with my opinion on that subject, but it is borne of experience with thousands of families…the heavy demands of child rearing do not slacken with the passage of time. In reality, the teen years generate as much pressure on the parents as any other era…Someone within the family must reserve the time and energy to cope with those new challenges. Mom is the candidate of choice. Remember, too, that menopause and a man’s midlife crisis are scheduled to coincide with adolescence, which can make a wicked soup! It is a wise mother who doesn’t exhaust herself at a time when so much is going on at home.” (Find full text here.)

As a 40-something part-time working mother of a teenager myself, I can appreciate the reader’s question, and the challenges Dobson acknowledges. But what galls me is the enormous shift in perspective that is engendered by prioritizing party first. Hillary Clinton was attacked years ago for not being a mom who stayed home making cookies, and who didn’t apologize for it. Now, Sarah Palin, who apparently put speech-making ahead of getting to a hospital to ensure her premature infant’s welfare, is the darling of the right. Where are all those critics who would otherwise be asserting that Bristol got pregnant as a bid for attention, because her parents, especially her mom, was otherwise engaged? Where are the arguments that if Sarah Palin had spent more time around the family house rather than the state house, maybe her daughter wouldn’t have made a choice that led to a child? You know that if Ms. Palin were of a different partisan stripe, such questions would be flying around the conservative blogs and airwaves thicker than a cloud of North Slope mosquitoes in July.

And if Sarah Palin were a man…well, we wouldn’t be having these conversations at all. At least not beyond whether a year and a half governing the state of Alaska qualifies a former small-town mayor to be vice president of the United States.

His shot at David Vitter is pretty funny, too.

But, why the gratuitous nard-stomping of two public servants who’ve paid their debt to society? Ah – maybe you missed this:

The Federal Marriage Amendment is back — with Vitter’s and Craig’s support
Posted June 27th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

Just this week, a group of Republican senators re-introduced the Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, which, as we know, would ban gay marriage.

And once again, the language is pretty straightforward:

Section 1. This article may be cited as the `Marriage Protection Amendment’.

Section 2. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.’.

This isn’t especially surprising. Republicans are looking at the political landscape, and they’re feeling awfully discouraged. The polls look bad, the base looks depressed, and fundraising looks iffy. Rallying the far-right troops with an anti-gay amendment to the Constitution — even though it has no chance at even getting so much as a hearing — might be helpful to the conservative movement.

But the funny part is looking over the list of the 10 original sponsors. Most of the names are predictable — Brownback and Inhofe, for example — but there are two others whose names stand out: Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho).

Pam’s House Blend weighs in here.

This is why it’s getting harder and harder to be a comedian, I think – how in the hell are you going to come up with a joke for this? Seriously, we live in an age where truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s a whole lot funnier. Or would be, if it weren’t so scary.

Sorry I don’t have more time to give this the treatment it deserves, but I’m participating in Dick Cheney’s March for Peace today and I have to go buy some new Birkenstocks…

Hasta.

Now, to understand the implications of this, you have to know a bit about me and a bit about Lana.  I’ll start with me.

I am a charter member of the very exclusive Society of Unattractive Men (SUM) founded by CPA Poindexter Schnitzelfarber in the back room of Deloitte, Haskins, and Sells’ Poughkeepsie office in March of 1970.  Though far from a “man” at the time, I was heartily embraced because I greatly exceeded SUM’s minimal membership requirements.  SUM got me through my middle and high school years, helping me build my ugly-man defenses against the assault of female revulsion.  For instance, SUM has found that statistical analysis of one’s social impact tends to immerse one in the numbers, leaving little time to contemplate the implications.  Looking back over my notes, for instance, I find that the mean high-school female startle response occurred only on the first five visual impressions, and that the mode female was able to control her trembling with a mere eight more looks at me.

I must thank the brothers Grimm for The Frog Prince and Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve for Beauty and the Beast for, surely, had these not been my wife’s favorite fairy tales growing up, I would still be a virgin.

Now, about Lana.

In 1990, I moved the family to Chicago for a new and better job.  I moved first, staying in an executive halfway house in Evanston until I could find a suitable home for us.  Lana had been the VP of Human Resources for an old client of mine in Houston, and had recently moved to the Chicago suburb of Palatine.  So, since I knew exactly nada about Chicagoland, I gave her a call to see if she would like to help with the house hunt.

She said she would.

I showed up at her house and after the inevitable knee-buckle (she hadn’t seen me in a while) and a couple of valium, we drove all over the Northwest suburbs looking for a house for the family.

Now, we all know at least one Lana.  She has the typical jet raven hair, wide, tyrian eyes, glowing, translucent skin, flaming red lipstick, and a bone structure Michelangelo couldn’t have reproduced on his best day.   She has to have her clothes specially made because off-the-rack stuff doesn’t fit Barbie proportions.  If she walked into a Hollywood casting party for desperate young starlets, she would stop the room.

So, Lana and I found a real estate agent who took us around to look at everything available in one of the NW towns and, at one point, the realtor says, “What do you think?” about a brick split-level near a train station.  To my infinite surprise, Lana wraps her arms around my arm, squeezes, snuggles up against me, and says, “I just don’t know.  What do you think, dear?”  Since this was only the second human female that ever touched me (my mother doesn’t count because of her Playtex fetish), I answered something like “Mmm frmmmph umphurm esheeesh.”  But, it seemed to satisfy the realtor, and we went on to look at more houses with the realtor thinking we were man and wife, mainly because Lana was doing her best June Cleaver (if a bit more clingy and huggy) to my Porky Pig.

Well, I figured it wasn’t a big deal to put the realtor on, since Lana and I weren’t likely to find the right house … but we did.  And, of course, when I brought the real wife to see the right house, and introduced her to the realtor as “my wife,” the realtor (may she rot in Hell) said, “but I thought …” before she caught herself.  Naturally, my wife went to DefCon 4, snapped her head around, and barked, “You thought what?,” which led to my explanation, an embarrassed and (God curse her) pitying look on the realtor’s face, and a ruinous florist bill for the next freakin’ year.

But, here’s the thing.  I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t get it.  If I had caught Lana on her most depressed and vulnerable day and smeared my body with Godiva’s finest, I’d have gotten about as far as Michael Vick at a PETA convention.  And it’s not just Lana, OK?  I mean, where are all these barely nubile succubi wearing tear-away panties each and every day just in the off chance that they might meet a balding, graying, paunching, and utterly irresistible older man who might, with much begging and wheedling, agree to quicken their eggs?  Where?  My wife seems to know about them.  Can you please point them out to me?  I’d really like a chance to probe this phenomenon.

It’s not that my wife is jealous, exactly.  On some level, she knows that females compete for prizes, and that no one has ever used my name and “prize” in the same sentence.  Or paragraph.  Or chapter.  Maybe she just likes pretending that she married a man who’s attractive to women.  Maybe she just likes watching me twist slowly in the wind.

I could really use some advice, here.  What the hell is really going on?  How do I get this Lana albatross off my freakin’ neck?

Mostly, what can anyone tell me about women, and the particular situation, that will help me to get it?

So today 2007 in Review will be addressing the public interest. For those who have forgotten, the public interest is what the public is interested in. I salute my colleagues for trying so hard to raise the level of discourse – if ever there were a windmill worthy of the tilt, this is it – but in the meantime the reader is invited to reflect on what really mattered to Americans in 2007.

The Punchline Gang: AKA Britney, Lynne, Jamie Lynne, K-Fed and their known accomplices. Not since the Von Trapps have one family unit provided so many Americans with such unending entertainment. I hope everybody enjoyed 2007, because the only way they’ll top this year’s act is if they all spontaneously combust in the skies over Boston Harbor on the 4th of July.

>Celebrity of the Year – Britney Spears: Brit posted the most record-breaking year in the history of celebrity hijinks.

• At one point there was a rumor that the FBI was investigating her for trying to put a HIT on K-Fed. We were thinking that since she sucked at being a soprano maybe she was going to try her hand at being a Soprano. Regardless, if she were going to have him whacked, couldn’t she have done it before his last CD dropped?
• In July Britney announced that she was pregnant but didn’t know who the babydadddy was. I guess she wasn’t really pregnant after all. Or maybe she just misplaced the fetus on one of her late-nite party binges. In any case, this was about the point where we decided that Anna Nicole had more in common with Princess Di than she did with Brit.
• Then she shaved her head and attacked an SUV with an umbrella.
• She showed up at the VMAs fat, drunk and barely able to sing. At first we thought she was John Daly.
• The word on the street now is that she has a new strategy to get her kids back (since missing drugs tests, blowing off counseling and generally telling the judge to sod himself don’t seem to be working as well as hoped) – she’s going to see if Angelina can buy them for her.
• Let’s sum it all up by noting that her biggest accomplishment in 2007 was to make ex Kevin Federline look like Ward Cleaver.

> Jamie Lynne: Teen TV star apparently sees big sis as a role model. Gets knocked up by a nice boy she met at church. Best we can tell statutory rape had to be involved, although if JL is like Brit it might take an army of lawyers to sort out exactly which of the kids was the victim.

Oh sweet Jesus – we just had a horrid thought: you don’t suppose K-Fed will have to raise this one, too?

> Lynne: First daughter #1 does her Whore of Babylon act for the whole world to see. Then daughter #2 gets caught with her feet to the ceiling. What else could possibly go wrong? Ah, this:

A Christian publisher said on Wednesday it has called off a parenting book written by Lynne Spears — the mother of troubled pop star Britney Spears and her pregnant 16-year-old sister, Jamie Lynn.
…
The working title for the book was “Pop Culture Mom: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World.” Described by the publisher as “a parenting book that’s going to have faith elements to it,” it had been set for publication on Mother’s Day in May 2008.

You heard it right, folks – the matriarch of the Punchline Gang has written a book on parenting. Snark seems so inadequate in the face of the raw journalistic fact.

> K-Fed: You still suck as a rapper, but we unconditionally apologize for every other nasty thing we ever said about you. What’s it like being Cliff Huxtable?

Of course, the Spears Clan weren’t the only people out there acting in the public interest in 2007.

Paris Hilton: Pimped Brit’s beaver for every photographer in Hollywood (100 points from Slytherin). Got arrested for DUI. Went to jail. Found God. Stripped for canned champagne. Praise Jesus.

• By the way, I’m thinking of suing Paris, Britney and the photographer who took that famous up-skirt. Ever since I saw that my nards have crawled up into my body and won’t come out.
• Unfortunately, Paris wasn’t in prison long enough to produce a sex tape. Imagine what that would have fetched on eBay.

Nicole Richie: Got sent to jail just like her bud Paris. Anybody up for a season of The Simple Life: San Quentin?

Alec Baldwin: Uncorked a locker room rampage on his ungrateful pig of a daughter. Bitch, please – kids these days are such wusses. When I was a kid I got rougher treatment than that on Christmas morning.

Lindsey Lohan: The year started badly for Lo-Blow (which means good for America). For a while we thought she was going to give Britney and Paris a run for their money. But rehab seems to be working for her, which stinks. Now Hollywood is going to have to find a way to make Siena Miller seem interesting. Trust me, this is not in the public interest.

Marcia Marcia Marcia! In her new book, The Brady Bunch’s Maureen McCormick’s reveals she had a lesbian fling w/ Eve Plumb (Jan). Tragically, this happened decades before the invention of handcams and YouTube.

Rock of Love: Bret Michaels does a reality show on VH1. Man, chicks dig that AARP card, huh?

Ellen DeGeneres: Somehow manages to botch a dog adoption and get the pup repossessed by the H-wood gendarmerie. She wouldn’t have these kinds of problems if she’d forget the fuzzbutts and just go buy an African child like everybody else.

Miss Teen SC: No, we don’t think she could find The Iraq on a map, but she had a better year than most US Americans, signing for $25K/day with The Donald. Last we heard she was enrolled at Appalachian State University trying to decide between majoring in The Politics, map-making or rocket surgery.

Speaking of The Donald: He had a nasty smack-off with Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie said Trump was a pig. Trump said Rosie was fat. We say it’s inappropriate to make fun of people’s appearance, especially when you get your hair done by a taxidermist.

Amy Winehouse: Fabulous CD, deserving of every scrap of the hype it has received. Of course, now she’s been busted for witness tampering, so expect her next record – Amy Jailhouse: LIVE from San Quentin! – in early 2009. Seriously, we hope she doesn’t go all Janis Joplin on us. And we really hope she doesn’t let Pete Doherty touch her. So far there are no documented cases of syphillis leaping across a room to infect someone, but just the same, health officials are keeping a close eye on England’s Latest Clown.

Alicia Keys: No, those shorts you wore at the Grammies didn’t make your butt look big. Your butt makes your butt look big.

Kid Rock: Got busted in an early-morning brawl. Just as his lame new CD dropped, we should note. Would somebody please tell MC Gomer here that nobody ever became relevant in a Waffle House at 5 am?

Celebrity Prejudice: It turned out there was no truth to the rumor that Isaiah Washington, Mel Gibson + Michael “KKKramer” Richards were working on a WW2-era sitcom where they would star as three wacky concentration camp guards. A shame – would have been better than anything with John Stamos in it.

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: The View star got into it with Rosie – her point seemed to be that if you were opposed to the war you were a traitor. Sharon Osbourne then weighed in, saying Liz “needs a lobotomy.” Ummm, “needs one” or “already had one”? If she were any dumber she’d need watering.

Star Jones: Lost a lot of weight and wound up looking like Oprah’s librarian grandmother. We hope she’ll consider beefing back up.

Madonna: Elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Yes, we said Rock & Roll. Jann Wenner is apparently afraid that he, Rolling Stone and the Hall aren’t irrelevant enough. Look for next year’s roster of inductees to include Dick Cheney and Richard Simmons.

Graham Parker: Over 30 years after his five-star debut, he’s back with another ***** masterpiece and the first S&R interview. The final votes aren’t in, but Don’t Tell Columbus may be the critics’ choice for CD of the Year. Of course, this thoughtful commentary on the state of the nation is way too intelligent to be taken seriously by the average American consumer. Verdict: not in the public interest.

Avril Lavigne: Announced that she wants to do things other than music, like be an actress. Wait, back up – Avril did music?

OJ Simpson: Acting on a hot tip that the real killers had wrapped up their golf for the day and were chilling in a hotel room, OJ and some associates bust in waving heat around and get arrested. It’s like the police don’t want Nicole’s murder solved.

Phil Spector: Murder trial ended in a hung jury, and preparations are under way for a retrial. In Spector’s defense, if you can’t bust a cap in a bitch in your own home, where can you?

Porn Spam Headline of the Year: BARBRA STREISAND GOES BRA-LESS. Sweet Jesus, are these people even trying anymore? People didn’t even want to see that in the ’70s.

Greenpeace Faux Pas Extraordinaire: The global environmental organization was forced into an embarrassing apology after twice attempting to tow Jennifer Love Hewitt back out to sea. Let’s face it, folks – chicks with cellulite don’t deserve to be loved.

Anna Nicole Smith/Babydaddy Controversy: Or, custody battle royale in Dogpatch – and the winner is Larry Birkhead! Cousin Larry was one of several hundred men to claim paternity – oddly, Eddie Murphy is about the only person who didn’t sleep with Anna Nicole on the day of Dannielynn Hope Marshall Birkhead’s conception. Poor little girl – now that the jackpot has been claimed Larry will have her living under the staircase and serving her two ugly stepsisters.

Pamela Anderson: In October she married Paris Hilton’s ex between shows in Vegas. Then a few weeks later announced she wanted a divorce. Then a few minutes later announced that she was reconsidering. Thank god – the couple has barely been together long enough to produce a decent sex tape.

Hulk Hogan’s Wife Has Had Enough: In the proposed divorce settlement she’ll get the house and half the cash. He’ll get custody of Rowdy Roddy Piper.

And in conclusion – Dick Cheney Sex Tape!: Bet that woke your ass up, huh? Okay, Cheney isn’t a “celebrity,” exactly, but we’re going to take a couple cheap shots anyway.

• A rumor was floating around for a week or so that Cheney might be involved in the “DC Madame” scandal. Mercifully, it seems not to have been true, but for awhile there hospitals across the country were reporting a spike in cases of spontaneous blindness.
• An August poll showed that 83% of Americans would rather be shot in the face by VP Cheney than to see him naked. The other 17% didn’t understand the question.

Thanks for joining me, and I hope this review has you better informed about the events and personalities that shaped your world in 2007.

Join us again tomorrow when my colleagues will be back boring you to death with things that “really mattered.” Enlightenment has ever been a tedious undertaking…

While the nature of the incentives wasn’t divulged, it’s believed they’d kick in when he ties each of the five players ahead of him on the all-time home run list — Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds –- and passes the last.

A few weeks ago, Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins wrote: “Rodriguez tried to sum up the tenor of negotiations, which sound more like ongoing couples therapy: ‘During these healthy discussions, both sides were able to share honest feelings and hopes with one another.’”

A-Rod, despite his macho name, is baseball’s Sensitive Boy. But the words in the statement Jenkins quoted might have been put in his mouth by who the New York Post describes as his “long-suffering wife,” Cynthia.

Since she not only has a degree in psychology and experience teaching the subject, she probably insisted on couples therapy after his marital infidelity — not to mention his well-documented general sexaholism based in the strip club culture.

Since then, the American League M.V.P. turned his back on the Yankees in search of a team that would sign him to an even more astronomical contract. Come to think of it, for Rodriguez, testing the waters of the free agent market was like playing the field while he was married.

But financier Warren Buffett stepped to the fore and played the same (not to mention surprising) role with his baseball career as a therapist no doubt did for his marriage. Like he renounced his girlfriend for his wife, Rodriguez returned to the Yankees.

Apparently he realized that, in the long run, unbridled greed and rampaging lust weren’t in his best interest as a baseball icon in the making.

Just like his wife is expecting their second child, maybe A-Rod and the Yankees can make a championship together.

Wife: Wow. Those pants look really good on you!

Me: They do? They’re the same jeans I wore yesterday.

Puzzled wife: They are? They didn’t look this good yester …

Me: Ahm. Er. I’ve probably cinched up my belt a little more. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the ticket. I cinched up my belt.

Medea: How about some lunch? I’m thinking nachos with lots of sour cream and guacamole, extra cheese, and … oh … I just baked some chocolate chip cookies! Want some now? How about a baker’s dozen? Then, we’ll have nachos. I’ll just have this little plate, and you can have this TURKEY PLATTER!!!!!

Naturally, all wives want slim and trim husbands. We make good accessories. But it’s not enough just to be fit. It’s important to them that we suffer for it. So, for those of you who find losing and keeping off weight a little too easy, here’s a guide to marital relations. (For those of you who want to use your steely new bodies to trade in wife 1.0 for the upgrade, I’ll publish a different guide later on the philandering husband protection program.)

1. Keep a full complement of ace bandages on hand. As you lose weight, you can wrap these suckers around the places the fat used to be, fooling her until you can fit into that 20-year-old tuxedo and she can say, “Wow. That’s really slimming on you.”
2. Rice cakes are very handy devices for hiding cookies, candy bars, and the like. Just put the tasteless thing over whatever you’re really eating and make a big show of gustatory martyrdom. She’s probably eaten a lot of rice cakes, and misery loves company.
3. Buy one six-pack of light beer and force it down. You can pour real beer into the light bottles later, and she’ll never be the wiser. The same goes with a bag of baked chips. You can put the nice, greasy, fried ones in the baked bag. Simple!
4. Tell her you have cancer. This will not only explain the easy weight loss, but also give you an excuse to go down to the local bar, watch football, and pig out on beer and breaded cheese sticks when you’re supposed to be getting your chemo.

Following these simple steps ensures a lifetime of wedded bliss, assuming you avoid the always popular does-this-make-me-look-fat trap. But if you’ve managed to stay married more than five minutes, you’ve already sidestepped that one.

ST. GEORGE, Utah (Reuters) – U.S. polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, the self-proclaimed “prophet” of a sect of breakaway Mormons, was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 years to life in prison for having forced a 14-year-old girl to marry her first cousin.The leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, received five years to life for each of two felony convictions on charges he was an accomplice to rape. The sentences will be served consecutively and a state board of pardons will ultimately determine how much time he spends in prison. (Story.)

The FLDS features all kinds of oddness, including “blood atonement” (“the extrajudicial killings of certain sinners”), “child brides, rabid racism, multiple wives, and a secretive, religious dictator” (that’d be our boy Warren, by the way).

Verily, Jeffs is a barking loon. In fact, in his better moments he might well be a crazier bastard even than the Rev. Fred Phelps.

Some readers might have been heretofore unacquainted with the peculiar wisdom of Mr. Jeffs. So, in order to provide you all with a better understanding of what won’t be roaming the streets loose for the next decade or so, let me provide you with a few snippets (and some downloadable mp3s) from the Book of Warren.

Warren Jeffs on our out-of-control Negro problem:

“Today you can see a black man with a white woman, et cetera. A great evil has happened on this land because the devil knows that if all the people have Negro blood, there will be nobody worthy to have the priesthood.”"If you marry a person who has connections with a Negro, you would become cursed.”

Click here to listen to more of Jeffs’ insight into Negroes.

Warren Jeffs on The Beatles (and Negroes):

“And so the manager of the group called in this Negro, homosexual, on drugs, and the Negro taught them how to do it. And what happened then, it went world wide… . So when you enjoy the [rock] beat … you are enjoying the spirit of the black race and that’s what I emphasize to the students. And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption, to forget their prayers, to forget God. And thus the whole world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways.”

Want to hear more on our Beatles problem? Click here.

Warren Jeffs on women, family and marriage:

“You can’t go to heaven and be a god unless you have more than one wife.”"I have been instructed that any young man who will not leave our girls alone is to be sent away and not allowed to be among us, even before they destroy the girl.”

So boys who like girls aren’t to be tolerated. Check. For more, click here.

Of course, there’s Warren Jeffs on the queer problem:

“The people grew so evil, the men started to marry the men and the women married the women. This is the worst evil act you can do, next to murder. It is like murder.”

Then there’s the whole End of the World issue, but at least here he offers some hope:

“Today the Lord rules over this people through President Jeffs, yet we’re under the bondage of the gentiles here in America. Soon the Lord will overthrow our nation and the priesthood people will rule over this land because the priesthood people will be the only ones left.”

There’s more, and thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center for doing the dirty work making it all public (and there’s some more here).

I always like to wrap these kinds of pieces with a tight little barbed zinger. But I’m just a simple country boy, and what am I really going to say to match the world-class crazy coming out of Jeffs’ own mouth? Enjoy the vacation, Warren, and may God reward you with everything you deserve.

However, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend that I think America’s current condition constitutes a “problem” and that I’m tasked with offering a solution. I would begin with one critical observation about your system of governance: The problem with democracy in America is that too many people are allowed to participate.

As my friend Walter Lippman noted as far back as the 1920s, ours is a complex society, and it’s almost impossible for the average citizen to know enough about most issues to actually cultivate an informed opinion. Society is unimaginably more complex now, 85 years on, and if anything citizens – excuse me, consumers – are even less capable of understanding the issues that shape their lives than they were then.

Think about it. In America you’re embroiled in a war that factored heavily in the last elections. Millions of people who cast votes in support of pro-war legislators would be hard-pressed to find Iraq on a map, however. People also care passionately about issues like stem-cell research, despite the fact that most don’t know what a stem-cell actually is. Americans are confused over scientific issues where there is near-unanimous consensus about the facts because politicians in service to corporate interests promote the myth that there is a “debate” on the issue.

What do a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry and a drooling hillbilly who doesn’t know what “dihydrogen monoxide” is have in common? Their votes count the same. A lifelong international policy analyst with two PhDs and a woman who can’t name a country that begins with “U”? Ditto. When racially charged issues creep into campaigns, as they inevitably do, your vote counts no more than that of the moron in upstate New York who’s never been to the South, never met a Southerner, couldn’t name the 13 states represented by the stars on the Confederate battle jack, but nonetheless has one nailed to the side of his house.

In fact, when it comes time to vote, America does not require any knowledge of the issues (real or imagined) at all. If you think Canada is a state, that doesn’t mean you can’t vote for a candidate who’s against Canadian-style socialized medicine. Your inability to distinguish between “lesbian” and “thespian” doesn’t mean you can’t vote against the rights of people in states you can’t locate on a map to marry.

Not even the most rudimentary acquaintance with the government, its laws, traditions or history is mandated. No study of the Constitution is necessary, and in fact someone who thinks that document contains the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is in no way prevented from pulling the curtain and participating in your glorious democracy.

In America, as elsewhere, 50% of all citizens are intellectually below average, statistically speaking, but they are nonetheless encouraged to vote about things they can’t possibly understand.

The results are predictable, and if your leaders seem stupid to you, if you can’t fathom how they can do the things they do, if you wonder at how control of your government is entrusted to people who are hardly among your brightest and best, well, you have your answer.

None of this is the fault of the nation’s founders. They set up a system where very few people could participate: white, male landowners. They didn’t do so for explicitly racist, sexist or classist reasons, but for the most pragmatic and sensible reason of all: those were the only people who could afford sufficient education to participate intelligently in the government. There’s certainly no reason to exclude the franchise today on the grounds of race, gender, class, etc. – all can contribute to the democracy so long as they’re educated and understand the issues they’re voting on.

Brilliant people are a minority in any nation, and the excellence of any endeavor requires the participation of that elite group. In America they are despised and mocked, and under no circumstances are they elected to high office.

So, if fixing your problems and creating solutions and alternatives were my job, I’d work very hard to disenfranchise the stupid. I’d start by requiring at least a passing knowledge of the issues – actual factual knowledge, not me-too dogma – before I let somebody near a ballot box. And of course, I’d make sure that my schools prepared people for this challenge. Not only would students learn the details of their nation’s government, they’d learn to think critically about it.

That might not solve everything, but it would be one hell of a start.

[UPDATE: Won't you please help save Sen. Vitter's winky?]

Click here to view the embedded video.

A bit of context is in order.

• Vitter is a no-compromises god-n-country anti-hanky-panky conservative who in 1998 said that Louisiana Rep. Bob Livingston’s resignation over marital infidelity “makes a very powerful argument that [President Bill] Clinton should resign as well.” [Atlanta Journal Constitution, 12/20/98. Pg. 04D]
• Vitter is so serious about marriage that he supported a Federal Sanctity of Marriage Amendment. “This is a real outrage. The Hollywood left is redefining the most basic institution in human history, and our two U.S. Senators won’t do anything about it. We need a U.S. Senator who will stand up for Louisiana values, not Massachusetts’s values. I am the only Senate Candidate to coauthor the Federal Marriage Amendment; the only one fighting for its passage. I am the only candidate proposing changes to the senate rules to stop liberal obstructionists from preventing an up or down vote on issues like this, judges, energy, and on and on.”
• However, Vitter has been forgiven by his wife and God: “Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling. Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there – with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way.”

Let me make sure I’m tracking here. Bubba getting his hooter buffed is a public matter that demand his resignation (and impeachment?) Vitter whistling up some streetwalkers is a private matter between him, God and the little lady. Got it. Moving on.

Maybe we should have known right away that something was up with Vitter when he signed on with Rudy Giuliani. I mean, first it was Bernie Kerik, then the Ravenel debacle, now this?

But maybe Vitter has suffered enough. “Asked by an interviewer in 2000 whether she could forgive her husband if she learned he’d had an extramarital affair, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Livingston’s wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the Times-Picayune: ‘I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.’”

Or maybe that talk-tough hypocritical blowhard thing runs in the family. Hard to say….

“It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking,” Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. “In France , for instance, I’m told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.” (Story.)

Mmmmkay. I’ve turned the Internets inside out and can’t find a scrap of evidence to support this claim. French law requires marriage contracts, which are mainly aimed at allocation of assets, but I can’t find anything that remotely looks like what Romney is saying here.

Ohhh, wait – maybe he heard it here?

(If there is something to what Romney says – I mean, it wouldn’t be unlike the French to try and innovate in the arena of love, I suppose – will somebody point me to a reference?)

Also, Mitt won’t let go of the idea that video games killed all those kids at Virginia Tech.

“We’re shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting,” Romney said. “I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve’s oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world.”

He added: “Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games. The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool.”

Again, I’ll gladly field evidence that supports these claims, but to date I don’t think we’ve seen anything that links Seung-Hui Cho to porn or video games or devil music (and if violent movies and TV cause mass murders I’m going to need to see the math – every American sees incredible amounts of mediated violence, and yet only one person out of 300 million launched a mass murder spree that day; statistically, suggesting that mediated violence prevents mass murder would be the better argument). We know he didn’t play video games, in fact.

So here’s what we can conclude from Romney’s stop at Regent, then.

• He’ll make things up if it advances his cause.
• He’ll exploit tragedy and distort the facts in order to advance his narrow, regressive social agenda.

None of this would make him the sort of president we need, but it would certainly make him the kind of president we’re used to.