Two Weddings, a Divorce and ‘Glee’

I should have known better than to expect Frank Rich at the New York Times to let Rush Limbaugh's FOURTH marriage go by without comment. It seems that "El Rushbo" is working to challenge Liz Taylor' serial marriage barring an early death from obesity, a heart attack or drug overdose. You also have to wonder what kind of woman would want to marry Limbaugh - I guess she got a good pre-nuptial deal. The hypocrisy of the "family values" crowd which often tends to have the highest divorce rate of any group - as opposed to the homo-lovers in Massachusetts - is indeed beyond belief. Their mantra that "marriage is between one man and one woman" needs to have the words "at a time" appended to the end of it. Not surprisingly, Frank Rich cannot help but note the disconnect between the multiple divorces and remarriages of the straight set and the denial of marriage to loving and committed same sex couples. Personally, what kills me is the intellectual dishonesty of those who cite the Bible's supposed condemnation of homosexuality yet utterly ignore the condemnation of divorce which is attributed to Christ himself. Hello? Anyone home in there? Rich also takes a detailed look at Perry v. Schwarzenegger which hopefully will strike down Proposition 8. Here are some highlights from Rich's column:
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THOSE of us left off the guest list could only fantasize about Rush Limbaugh’s nuptials last weekend. Now cruising into marriage No. 4 — an impressive total for a guy not quite 60 — Rush staged a lavish luau at the Breakers in Palm Beach. The revelers included what some might regard as the Rat Pack from hell — Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, James Carville and Clarence Thomas. The scriptural readings remain a mystery. But we did learn the identity of the pop deity anointed as the wedding singer. That would be Elton John, whose last, albeit second-class, wedding was a civil union with David Furnish in 2005.
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Why would America’s right-wing radio king hire an openly gay entertainer to star at his wedding? And why would one of the world’s foremost AIDS activists sing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” for a gay-baiting provocateur who has trivialized AIDS and speculated that same-sex marriage could lead people to marry dogs? Sir Elton’s fee was reported to be a cool $1 million. Which goes to show that pop music and cash have the power to make even stranger bedfellows than politics.
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[T]here is a shadow over marriage in America just the same. The Gores and Limbaughs are free to marry, for better or for worse, and free to enjoy all the rights (and make all the mistakes) that marriage entails. Gay and lesbian couples are still fighting for those rights. That’s why the most significant marital event of June 2010 is the one taking place in San Francisco this Wednesday, when a Federal District Court judge is scheduled to hear the closing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the landmark case challenging Proposition 8, California’s same-sex marriage ban. A verdict will soon follow, setting off an appeals process that is likely to land in the Supreme Court, possibly by the 2011-12 term.

When the former Bush v. Gore legal adversaries, Ted Olson and David Boies, teamed up to mount the assault on Prop 8, it was front-page news. But you may not know much about the trial that followed unless you made a point of finding out as it unfolded in January. Their efforts in this case, unlike the 2000 election battle, were denied the essential publicity oxygen of television. The judge had planned to post video of the proceedings daily on YouTube, but the Prop 8 forces won a 5-to-4 Supreme Court ruling to keep cameras out.
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Their stated reason for opposing a television record was fear that their witnesses might be harassed. But in the end the Prop 8 defenders mustered only two witnesses, just one of them a controversial culture warrior. That “expert” was David Blankenhorn, president of the so-called Institute for American Values. Blankenhorn holds no degree in such seemingly relevant fields as psychology, psychiatry or sociology. But his pretrial research did include reading a specious treatise by George Rekers, the antigay evangelist now notorious for his recent 10-day European trip with a young male companion procured from Rentboy.com.
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You can’t blame the Prop 8 advocates for wanting to keep Blankenhorn off camera. Boies demolished him during cross-examination. (Read the transcripts at equalrightsfoundation.org.) Another likely motive for opposing cameras at the trial was to shield viewers from the sympathetic gay plaintiffs — ordinary tax-paying Americans whose families, including four children, were often in the courtroom.
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Gays are far from the only Americans still facing discrimination, but as Boies said when I interviewed him about the Prop 8 case last week, the ban on same-sex marriage “is the last area in which the state is taking an active role in enforcing discrimination.”
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[A]s long as gay Americans are denied the same right to marry as everyone else, they are branded as sub-citizens, less equal and less deserving than everyone else. That government-sanctioned stigma inevitably leaves them vulnerable to other slights and discrimination, both subtle and explicit. The damage is particularly acute for children, who must not only wonder why their parents are regarded as defective by the law but must also bear this scarlet letter of inferiority when among their peers.
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It’s not news that same-sex marriage is a settled issue for most young people. But the growing adult acceptance of unconventional family models can be found in the phenomenon of “Glee,” the prime-time hit on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, no less, that unexpectedly became this year’s most watched new scripted series on television for the 18-to-49 demographic. . . The leading teenage characters in “Glee” have single parents (both widowed), absentee parents and, in one case, two gay dads.
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Until the law catches up to the culture, the collective American soul should find even June’s wedding Champagne a bit flat.