As next month’s GOP straw poll in Iowa draws ever closer, all Republicans who wish to be President are being urged to sign “The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage & Family.”
Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum have already signed.
The Pledge is a bizarre combination of 1950s sexual conservatism and Cold War-style doomsday-ism (it opposes “infanticide” and the “enslavement” of military wives), which it blends into an obsession with marriage and morality. It claims, with an absolutely straight face, that “candidates’ positions on core values, such as marriage, correlate directly to their moral stances on energy issues, sound budgeting, national defense, and economic policies.”
Apparently, these people either don’t realize that George W. Bush was a devout Christian, or they don’t notice that he personally directed the rape of America’s environment, destruction of its budget surplus, or invasion of a country that posed no threat to us whatsoever.
And while we’re at it, let’s remember that Richard Nixon was a devoted husband and father who lied to America so profoundly, about such important things, that he actually had to quit office. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was a divorced man with a colorful past who was conservative to his core. FDR ran around on Eleanor, and rescued America during the depression. Anyone really prefer Hoover?
It’s time someone stood up and said the obvious: a President’s relationship to his wife, his kids, and his dog are no predictor of his fitness for office. Ditto a female President.
***
In addition to its garden-variety opposition to same-gender marriage, candidates signing the Marriage Pledge also:
* acknowledge that “robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to the U.S.;”
* recognize a category called “stolen innocence,” which includes “seduction into promiscuity” and “all forms of pornography”—-which must be opposed;
* realize the alleged statistical evidence that “married people enjoy better sex.”
This last bit of junk science goes hand-in-glove with the “science” of creationism.
***
Interestingly, the 14-point Marriage Pledge doesn’t demand that candidates be held responsible for keeping their political promises. It just makes the wild assumption that people who support monogamy and oppose contraception are more likely to do so. Putting aside the illogic of this, don’t these people read the papers, which continually announce the sexual foibles of the professedly moral?
Instead of grilling candidates on how they will keep predatory, irresistable gay soldiers from seducing, bullying, or depressing our weak, defenseless heterosexual soldiers, I’d prefer a pledge requiring candidates to:
* explain the Separation of Powers that underlies the American system of government;
* name one advantage of any non-American government in the world;
* promise to tell the truth about both themselves and their opponents, and pledge to immediately resign if found to have lied about either one.
I’d also like to see candidates commit to either ending all tax deductions for religious institutions, or require them to stay out of politics. I’d prefer both, but I’d settle for one.
***
In case you missed it, let me repeat: those who wish to be U.S. President are being asked to pledge their opposition to contraception, pornography, “easy” divorce, and the separation of Church & state, while affirming their support for heterosexual monogamy.
I hope every Republican aspirant signs this. Let them finally admit their alleged positions. Watch the anointed candidate squirm when he or she has to recant once the election campaign starts.
Among its many hysterical positions, the Marriage Pledge demands rejection of “anti-women Sharia Islam.” This seems contradictory; after all, with its opposition to contraception, abortion, divorce, pornography, promiscuity, and its demand that religious morality be the basis of political decision-making, it seems that Sharia—minus the headscarves and stoning for adultery—is exactly what this Pledge demands.