Marriage in the abstract

So, it's National Marriage Protection Week. What does that mean?

Apparently not much. At least not anything that might make an actual difference in terms of actually protecting actual marriages. It doesn't mean special discounts from babysitters, florists, romantic restaurants and marriage counselors. (If I were designing a week to bolster marriages I would insist, to paraphrase Rupert Everett, "By God, there should be dancing!")

But no, NMPW is merely a political bone for social conservatives and the religious right.

Even that might not be wholly useless if it were done in more of a Promise-Keeper-ish way. I'm no fan of PK — too many of its leaders think of marriage as a hierarchy — but it's not all bad. (I heard one guy describe their advice this way: "If you want to be a good husband, love your kids. If you want to be a good father, love your wife.")

One could imagine a Marriage Protection Week that campaigned against actual threats to actual marriages — things like infidelity and, especially, abuse. But NMPW is not concerned with actual, real-world marriages, only with marriage in the abstract.

This makes the whole exercise rather beside the point. No one can marry in the abstract. No one ever has. Marriage is a gloriously, untidily particular thing.

(The only concrete proposal — besides a pitch for more tax cuts — in President Bush's proclamation of NMPW is a mention of "a healthy marriage initiative to help couples develop the skills and knowledge to form and sustain healthy marriages." What does that mean? Has Bush decided to federalize Pre Cana?)

It is only by ignoring reality — marriage in fact, marriages in fact — that one could conceive of something like President Bush's National Marriage Protection Act and leap to the absurd conclusion that the greatest threat to marriages in America is gay people.

Any objective consideration of actual American marriages and the things that actually threaten them would have to account as a top priority the horrifying epidemic of domestic violence and abuse in this country.

October has also been proclaimed National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The victims of "National Domestic Violence" are probably already pretty aware of the situation, but it's nice to see the White House joining in this awareness. Unfortunately, this awareness does not extend to any notion that this special month might have any bearing on this special week.

Fighting domestic violence does not seem, in President Bush's mind, to have anything to do with "protecting marriage." No, for the president and his allies in the religious right, "protecting marriage" means making sure that it never extends to include gays and lesbians.

There is no such thing as marriage in the abstract. But marriage in the aggregate, as the religious right is fond of pointing out, isn't exactly thriving. "Halfofallmarriagesendindivorce," they say, which is more or less the case.

What I still do not understand — and what they still have not explained — is why they seem to think that the cause of this is the possibility that sometime in the future, gay couples might also marry.