Mazel tov, you crazy kids!

Best. Marriage. Proposal. Ever.:



I don't know about you, but that warmed the cockles of my cynical little heart.

Around the blogroll and elsewhere

Because there's too much good stuff going on out on the Ceres of Toobz(^TMthe late Ted Stevens) for you to waste your time looking for Beckapalooza coverage on C-SPAN.

Wonkette promises to be fun viewing today. (h/t TBogg, who also promises some damn fine coverage. No, I'm not in favor of pointing at overweight disabled people and laughing. I'm in favor of making fun of STUPID, IGNORANT overweight disabled people who think the laid-off are parasites and who get a Social Security check and Medicare and then go to rallies decrying "socialism." Yes, it would be better if we could just TALK to them and try to bring them around, but ZOMG THERE'S A BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE -- and what can we say to THAT -- Albert Pujols notwithstanding, because for some reason, even the most rabid racists seem to think it's OK for black men to entertain them in sports venues.

By the logic of Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, we will stay in Afghanistan forever.

Cookie Jill takes a look back at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Crooks and Liars has had work done, and I must say, they look fabulous.

So our beloved Tata, she of the fabulous fashion and decorating sense, who actually still cooks great things using fresh ingredients that she grew herself, went and got married to the equally fabulous Artist Currently Known As Pete, who is equally as good a cook, and we had to find out about it like this. Mazel tov, you crazy kids!

What Sean said.

When I was in my silly youth, I used to wear 3" heels while on my feet all day in a retail job. It was only a couple of years ago that I took the satin slides with the 4" heels and rhinestone trim over to the thrift shop because there was no way in hell I would ever wear them again. I wore heels for-frickin-ever, because that's what you do when you are young and female in this society, and later on because you are 4'10" tall. And then when you are fifty, you are reduced to buying sandals with arch supports and going to Joe's New Balance Outlet web site to see what Aravon shoes they have on sale that don't make you look like you're ninety -- because those are the best damn shoes for those of us who have falling arches due to age and who are prone to plantar fasciitis. It is against this backdrop that we link to Amanda, who muses on what we do to women's feet in this society in the name of fashion. I blame Sarah Jessica Parker.

If the teabaggers would listen to Bustednuckles instead of Glenn Beck, maybe we could get somewhere.

Driftglass explains why his ragging on the idiotic David Brooks matters.

Konagod and Mr. Konagod have been threatening the sanctity of heterosexual marriage for twenty years this week. Happy anniversary, you crazy kids!

That should keep you out of trouble for a while. Now I'm going for a walk. It's a lovely 60 degrees and sunny out, it's going to be 95 every day for the next four days, and I'm going to go do the lis pendens tour of the neighborhood. The list gets bigger every day.

That sound you hear is Ann Althouse's teeth gnashing

You'd think that after 26 years with Mr. Brilliant, 23 of them in a marriage far more solid than that of your average wingnut, I'd no longer be a sap for cute wedding stories. But one of my weekly guilty pleasures is reading the "Vows" feature in the Sunday New York Times. I started reading this once when the couple was in their 80s, had met in the Catskills like five decades ago, gone their separate ways, and then married late in life. It was the kind of story where in the movies the couple would be played by Walter Matthau and Gena Rowlands, Nora Ephron would write and direct it, and only the acting would keep it from being awful. Mr. B. and I met cute too back in 1983, but there were no blogs, only 'zine culture, and at that time broadcasting your personal life to a bunch of strangers seemed really self-indulgent.

How times change. Ha.

But imagine my surprise to actually see a name I recognized in today's "Vows" column, for today's feature was the wedding of Feministing's Jessica Valenti and TPM's Andrew Golis in what may be the bloggiest marriage to date. Ms. Valenti wore a lovely V-necked dress, and I'm quite certain that this evening, Ann Althouse is examining the photo carefully for traces of cleavage.

Let me offer as a gift three pieces of advice for a successful marriage:

1) Don't have kids.
2) Pay attention to each other.
3) Accept that you'll have to set the toilet seat the way you want it every time.

Mazel Tov!

Here's the bottom line: If you wouldn't want your spouse to know about it, it should at least set off alarms in your head.

Turns out that Mark Sanford's midlife crisis was more extensive than just the lovely Maria:

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford says he "crossed lines" with a handful of women other than his mistress — but never had sex with them.

The governor said he "never crossed the ultimate line" with anyone but Maria Belen Chapur, the Argentine at the center of a scandal that has derailed his once-promising political career.

"This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," Sanford said. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day."

Oh, horsepuckey. This guy fucked this woman a few times and exchanged e-mails, and it's true love? It's easy to keep up that hormone high for a long time when you're not dealing with day to day life. Doesn't mean it's love, it means it's hormones. So can we please stop this horseshit that Mark Sanford is, as MoDo so accurately described him the other day, "Marco", the great romantic who just happened to meet his true soulmate while married to another? Can we please stop this ridiculous narrative?

There isn't a married couple in the country that didn't feel this same thing in the beginning. It's why they decided to commit to each other. But just because you aren't on a hormone high all your life doesn't mean you've fallen out of love.

Look, Mr. Brilliant and I have been married for 23 years this September. And those hormone high days are long behind us. But I'm sitting here in a hotel in Cologne, Germany, and I can't WAIT to get home to the guy who's learned how to zone out when faced with my incessant yammering instead of yelling "Can you possibly shut the fuck up for ten seconds?"; the guy who knows exactly where the spot is on my back that always itches before I even ask him to scratch; the guy who after 23 years still makes me laugh -- and I can still make him laugh. Would I trade that for the heady high of some bad romance novel notion of Intense Tortured Forbidden Love?

Not on your life, bub.

But just when the death of Michael Jackson had driven Mark Sanford from the front pages, along he comes with boasts of his other conquests, but because it didn't involve the old in-out, in-out, it wasn't cheating.

I say bullshit.

During an emotional interview at his Statehouse office with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Sanford said Chapur is his soul mate but he's trying to fall back in love with his wife.

'Didn't cross the sex line'
He said that during the encounters with other women he "let his guard down" with some physical contact but "didn't cross the sex line." He wouldn't go into detail.

Sanford said the casual encounters happened outside the U.S. while he was married but before he met Chapur, on trips to "blow off steam" with male friends.

Sanford also admitted he saw Chapur more times than previously disclosed, including what was to be a farewell meeting in New York chaperoned by a spiritual adviser soon after his wife found out about the affair.

He described five meetings with Chapur over the past year, including two romantic, multi-night stays with her in New York before they met there again intending to break up.

He said he saw her two other times, including their first meeting in 2001 at an open-air dance spot in Uruguay.

"There was some kind of connection from the very beginning," he told The Associated Press, though he said neither that meeting nor a 2004 coffee date in New York during the Republican National Convention were romantic.

First of all, I wish the media would stop buying into this narrative that a woman Mark Sanford fucked seven times and then had thousands of miles between them is his true soulmate. I know our culture is saturated with this notion that the hormone high of a new encounter is true love, but it's not. Period. In fact, I'd say that you don't know someone is your soul mate until you've been with them a few years and smelled the farts and listened to the yammering and heard them snip their toenails and eaten the dish that didn't quite work out but took all day to make -- and you still love the person anyway. Fucking in a hotel in Argentina and e-mail does not soulmates make.

As for the "connection", well, Sanford is a married man. That "connection" should have been a giant red alarm clock screaming "DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!" And it should have been a signal that either a) Sanford was unhappy in his marriage and hadn't realized it and maybe he should examine why and work with his wife to improve things; b) he knew he was unhappy and used this as his excuse to cut his ties and make a new life; or c) he was an asshole and a narcissist and there's no reason he shouldn't have the wife to wash the skid marks out of his underwear and the girlfriend in Argentina.

I'm not saying that if you're married you will never find anyone else attractive. We're not dead, after all. But there's "I like the way that looks" and "I must have that", and if you are feeling the second one, you'd better think about whether trading what you have for "that" is a good trade. Becuase a real man would weigh alternatives and make a choice. And live with the consequences.

But Mark Sanford is clearly c): An asshole. This is a guy who set himself as moral arbiter for Bill Clinton and every Democrat he regarded as less moral and holy than himself. And while he was doing so, he was groping everything in sight, justifying it all by saying he never "crossed the sex line."

I don't fault Jenny Sanford for trying to patch up a marriage in which she has many years invested, though I think the so-called "counselor" who has been working with the couple has made clear in the press that his reaction to Mark Sanford's escapades are "Atta boy" more than anything else. Perhaps she thinks this is a wake-up call, and they might come out of this with a new closeness and ability to communicate. But somehow I don't think so. Because the fact is that she is married to a narcissistic, sociopathic creep whose sense of grandiosity has him comparing himself to a Shakespearean protagonist and a Biblical king. No matter how many heroes to whom Mark Sanford may compare himself, the bottom line is that he's just an asshole.

Around the blogroll and elsewhere: Let's Pile On Mark Sanford Edition

Because "hiking the Appalachian trail" is a euphemism we haven't heard before.

Blue Gal pens a letter to Mrs. Sanford.

Blue GIRL says she too has sometimes felt like running off to Argentina. (I, however, really AM in Cologne.)

Drifty and Maggie bring Teh Funny.

Jesse: Evasion: Ur doin it wrong.

And finally...

Melissa watched the presser. Another good God-fearin' Repulican specifically targeted by Satan, as if Lucifer and God play Skee-ball down in Keansburg and the ol'forked tail one gets extra bonus points by getting Christians to fall off the chastity and fidelity wagon. You'd think by now we could put the culture wars to bed, after seeing sanctimonious family-values Republican after sanctimonious family-values Republican get up and do one of these confessions. Funny....not all of us feel driven to cheat on our spouses. In fact, if I were going to guess, I'd say that secular people probably cheat LESS, because most of us allowed ourselves to sow our wild oats when we were young, whereas these people had to marry the first person they slept with.

Christianity as a spiritual system may or may not be about loathing your own presence as a sexual being. But Capital-C-Christianity as it's pontificated by social values conservatives in this country is about fear and loathing -- of themselves and of everyone else who doesn't need to believe in a big nasty punishing Great White Alpha Male in the sky, or a get-out-of-jail-free card, to have a code of moral values.

The hell with Mark Sanford, and Newt Gingrich, and Larry Craig, and the bunch of them. A bunch of lying sacks of shit -- id-driven two-year-olds who want to pass laws controlling the behavior of other people because they can't control their own.

Now will the media stop listening to these nimrods?

And a message to the President: With this latest example of how the proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act treat their own marriages so cavalierly, isn't it a great time to seriously work on repealing it? After all, gays are not the threat to the marriage of Republicans. The Republicans are doing a fine job of it all by themselves.

UPDATE: Great Orange Satan: Fox News identifies Sanford as a Democrat. Because reality has a decided liberal bias, and arbitrarily changing Sanford's party affiliation in the crawl is just creating an "alternative fact."

Love Conquers All

I have been so sadly remiss in reading the blogs of my wonderful blogrollees that I completely missed this astounding and joyful news from our friend and occasional contributor, jurassicpork. Call it a leap of faith if you must, but join me in wishing one of the Great Curmudgeons of Blogging and his soulmate a happy future together. And if you're feeling so inclined, you could help those two crazy kids get started by going over to JP's home base and clicking the ol' "Donate" button. After all, there's a recession on and champagne flutes from Tiffany's seem kinda like an extravagant indulgence in this economy. You won't get a dance with the bride for your envelope of cash, or a mediocre prime rib dinner and a bad D.J. leading the chicken dance, but I'm sure they could use it.

You Just Cost Me Money

This guy is a clown:

RNC chief: Gay marriage will burden small business
By RUSS BYNUM

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Republicans can reach a broader base by recasting gay marriage as an issue that could dent pocketbooks as small businesses spend more on health care and other benefits, GOP Chairman Michael Steele said Saturday.

Steele said that was just an example of how the party can retool its message to appeal to young voters and minorities without sacrificing core conservative principles. Steele said he used the argument weeks ago while chatting on a flight with a college student who described herself as fiscally conservative but socially liberal on issues like gay marriage.

"Now all of a sudden I've got someone who wasn't a spouse before, that I had no responsibility for, who is now getting claimed as a spouse that I now have financial responsibility for," Steele told Republicans at the state convention in traditionally conservative Georgia. "So how do I pay for that? Who pays for that? You just cost me money."

As Steele talked about ways the party could position itself, he also poked fun at his previous pledge to give the GOP a "hip-hop makeover."

"You don't have to wear your pants cut down here or the big bling," he said.

Steele merely expressing national Chamber of Commerce view. Note that he doesn't tell how the college student reacted. A socially liberal (or even moderate) person supports equal rights in the form of civil unions or marriage, both of which extend (or ought to extend) the same basic spousal & family benefits in the workplace. In exacting civil union legislation like Great Britain has, the legal & contractual benefits & obligations are identical to marriage. Supporting marriage over civil unions tends to go to other matters. It also recognizes that America isn't Great Britain, & our tentative approach is resulting in a patchwork of conflicting & unfair laws. So the young "socially liberal" student would have to oppose both unions & marriage, which we can be certain she will not do on the counsel of The Party of Homobigots. Same sex marriage is better for small business than civil unions because it opens up the vast wedding industry to a new, affluent clientele.

The argument, "You just cost me money," sounds like the gripe of an unhappily married heterosexual man headed for divorce court. The young woman on the plane must have picked up on that tone & thought, "Here's an a-hole who won't pay his child support on time." Hey Mikey, remember, "It's cheaper to keep her."

What IS marriage, anyway?

The fact that gay marriage isn't at the forefront of this year's presidential campaign is only to the good -- unless you're gay and are no closer to having the same rights as hetero people have when you commit to the person you love than you did a year ago. The lack of focus on gay marriage is keeping wingnut homophobia under wraps, to be sure, but it's also pushed the issue to the back burner, while gay Americans are still being denied spousal rights when it comes to illness, homeownership, adoption, and a host of other things many of us take for granted.

I don't think anyone is advocating forcing churches to perform gay marriages, but if we separate out the church component of marriage from the state component, what we have is in effect a civil union.

When Mr. Brilliant and I married, we had a short secular ceremony done by a Presbyterian minister who was a friend of my parents. We were adamant about a secular ceremony, and he complied only because of the family friendship factor. No church or religious structure sanctions the institution in which we've been living for over 21 years, only the state of New Jersey, where the piece of paper is filed.

Religious traditions may have their reasons for not opening marriage to gays, but the state has none. So why is the state in the marriage business anyway?

Stephanie Coontz writes in the New York Times today:

Using the existence of a marriage license to determine when the state should protect interpersonal relationships is increasingly impractical. Society has already recognized this when it comes to children, who can no longer be denied inheritance rights, parental support or legal standing because their parents are not married.

As Nancy Polikoff, an American University law professor, argues, the marriage license no longer draws reasonable dividing lines regarding which adult obligations and rights merit state protection. A woman married to a man for just nine months gets Social Security survivor’s benefits when he dies. But a woman living for 19 years with a man to whom she isn’t married is left without government support, even if her presence helped him hold down a full-time job and pay Social Security taxes. A newly married wife or husband can take leave from work to care for a spouse, or sue for a partner’s wrongful death. But unmarried couples typically cannot, no matter how long they have pooled their resources and how faithfully they have kept their commitments.

Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.

Perhaps it’s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem “licit.” But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship.

It seems like a simple solution, doesn't it? So where's the problem?

I've said more than once that the reason we cannot acknowledge differences among groups in this country is because we seem unable to recognize differences without ranking them according to worth -- and traits or characteristics or benefits that white Christian males have always seem to rank higher on the worth scale than those of other groups, because it's white Christian males doing the ranking. This is why it's unlikely that we'll ever see the states getting out of the marriage business -- because if you take marriages like mine -- secular unions without children -- or marriage between gays and lesbians -- and call them civil unions, it won't be regarded by the Guys Who Make the Rules as the same as their Jeebus-sanctioned unions blessed by some guy in a robe. It'll be somehow second- or third-best and everyone will know that it's not the same.

But maybe that's what we need to do in order to show the utter ludicrousness of this unholy partnership (if you'll pardon the expression) that currently exists when state interests collide with belief in a story passed down through generations.