Cinema Notes From All Over (Heterosexual Marriage Division)

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca.--Just Go With It, in theaters today and starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, is the kind of light Hollywood comedy that keeps the world safe for white heterosexuals by affirming family values and subtly marginalizing all others. 

   Oh, wait, do we sound "politically correct"? Is that opening paragraph enough to put you off already?

  If so, perhaps we should review the concept of "political correctness" before we decode the movie.  

   It is a cultural truism that s/he who names the group wields the influence; in language there is power. 

   When a dominant societal group names a marginalized one, the language often is oppressive and purposefully divisive: blacks are "niggers" and "coons," Hispanics "wetbacks" and "beaners," Asians "slants" and "gooks," women "girls," homosexuals "faggots" and "fairies," etc. 

   The counter-cultural shifts in nineteen-sixties and -seventies America emboldened marginalized groups to assert themselves. Many signaled this move to power by re-naming themselves.

   Blacks became "African-Americans," Hispanics "Latinos," Asians "Asian/Pacific Islanders," women, well, "women" rather than the reductive "girls," homosexuals "lesbians and gays." (Later, the ultra-inclusive gay communities expanded the nomenclature to "lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender," occasionally adding "queer"--a reclamation of a slur--and the somewhat baffling "questioning.") 

   The dominant power structure at the time largely was composed of conservative white males. No dominant power structure passively brooks--not for long anyway--any claim to power by the theretofore powerless. So conservative think tanks did what they often do: flipped language on its head and sent the new linguistic virus into the mainstream cultural conversation. 

   Thus was born the idea of "political correctness," a notion that re-marginalized the groups trying to claim a place at the cultural and legislative table. Conservatives shifted the conversation away from a rational consideration of what it might mean for disenfranchised people to be equal to their fellows and steered it to the “reality” that these very groups were telling others how to speak and think.

   This was, of course, an absurd claim, given that those very groups had essentially been told how to think and speak for decades, sometimes centuries, by the very same power structure then averring they were doing it to others. 

   The clearest example of this kind of linguistic jujitsu arrived, in the eighties and early nineties, in the form of conservative radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh's bloviating. Women at the time were agitating for pay equal to men's, an end to gender discrimination and the right to make decisions about their own bodies.

   Limbaugh dubbed them "feminazis." He thus equated American citizens campaigning for equal rights to psychopathic killers who had decimated roughly six million marginalized people in a country halfway around the globe four decades prior.  

   George Herbert Walker Bush, an American president who served from 1988-1992, did the same thing. Members from the protest group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) demonstrated outside the Bush summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, in the late eighties. They hoped to bring national attention to the Food and Drug Administration's foot-dragging on testing and approving potentially life-saving AIDS medications.   

   Mr. Bush said the protesters were using "Nazi tactics," an odd assertion to make about a group of Americans exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and peaceable assembly. 

   But this marginalized group--AIDS protesters agitating for sick and dying friends--was attempting to assert power. Mr. Bush, a representative of the conservative power structure, therefore equated them with--do you see a theme here?--psychopathic killers who had decimated roughly six million marginalized people in a country halfway around the globe four decades prior. (Victims included gays and lesbians, who were forced to wear identifying pink triangles in the concentration camps.)

   Now, then. Were some of the re-naming efforts by marginalized groups silly and fruitless? Sure. (Hello, “differently abled” and “height challenged” people.) And were some liberals humorless and insufferably self-righteous in the process of asserting power? Absolutely.

   But that only made it easier for conservatives to mock them as “politically correct.” This undermined the groups' legitimate claims to equality by ridiculing the groups as scolds, thus trivializing their drive to enjoy equal rights by likening them to junior high school assistant principles. 

    The vacuum of the "political correctness" argument is meant to leave no breathing room for actual conversation about the way people and groups appear and function in society. So for the moment why don't we suspend that intellectually lazy notion and see if we can't realistically dissect Just Go With It, which bears all kinds of culturally stereotyped characters. 

   We’ll first note this: in one format or another, First of All has been tracking and commenting upon these sorts of character-based media misrepresentations for twenty-five years. We are as tired of doing it as you may be of hearing it. Once-disenfranchised groups have made too many advancements for this sort of thing to much stir us. 

   That said, there is an inexplicable level of white, heterosexual hegemony in Just Go With It. This is odd when, for example, in California, ethnic minorities, taken together, comprise the state's majority. Or maybe it’s not so odd: the ethnic makeup of America is shifting rapidly--indeed, we have an African-American president--and a film such as this one soothes frayed Caucasian nerves by creating a white-dominant fantasy world.

   The only black character is an effeminate and sassy hairstylist. (That's a two-fer.) The other “gay” character is an effeminate hotel staffer. Then there are the videogame addicted Latina nanny and an overweight Hawaiian babysitter who passes out after eating too much food. (You know those female people of color: great for menial work but terrible at anything requiring maternal focus.)

  Even the lead character’s  ethnicity seems to be treated questionably. Mr. Sandler plays a Jewish plastic surgeon. As a young man he has a huge and ugly nose and is considered a schlump by his wife-to-be. In voiceover he notes that he later "got rid of the schnozz" with plastic surgery; we see him as a successful surgeon who is a sexual hit with young women (to whom he lies about being married in order to get laid, the concept that sets up the comedic engine of the film). 

   Doesn’t this imply that the way for the ugly duckling Jewish kid to become the hot adult swan is to surgically alter ethnically endemic features that also happen to the one root of the stereotype about his group? 

   As to the movie itself: it’s marginally cute. It has the sitcom-requisite smart, snotty and scheming kids. Mr. Sandler's character is charming. Ms. Aniston, whose movies we normally avoid, is completely likable. Nicole Kidman, in a role not credited on the movie's posters, shines as a domineering one-time sorority sister to Ms. Aniston's character. 

   Incidentally, with her surgically altered/destroyed face, Ms. Kidman now looks like an ancillary "Ren and Stimpy" character. There is a subtextual joke about this in the movie, and one wonders if Ms. Kidman was in on it. 

   Ms. Kidman the actress has denied having any cosmetic surgery save Botox injections. In one of the film’s scenes, her character asks Mr. Sandler's--the plastic surgeon--what, if anything, he'd do to cosmetically enhance her. He says "nothing," adding that she's perfect. 

   In fact, her face looks like a late-period Picasso. That a plastic surgeon should state that he'd do "nothing" to enhance her looks implies that enough has been done already. But this is never said. Instead, Mr. Sandler's character, getting in a dig to win Ms. Aniston's character's approval, zings Ms. Kidman's character by suggesting that "they"--a reference to her plastic surgeon/s-- took too much fat out of her arms. Her face, however, save that it is "perfect," goes uncommented upon, even as it appears as expressive as a Noh mask.

   Just Go With It is a purposefully frivolous film in which man gets—and marries—woman in the end as the fantasy world’s marginalized people look on and cheer. (The black and presumably gay hairstylist makes Ms. Aniston’s character look fabulous so that she can perpetuate a ruse that unintentionally winds up with her marrying Mr. Sandler’s character. The hairstylist no doubt does it with the stark and dispiriting knowledge that in most American states he cannot legally marry his boyfriend.)

   The movie is a cultural warm bath for the dominant power structure and its aspirational admirers that passes itself off as a comedy. 
   Is it funny? 

   We laughed once.

Cinema Notes From All Over (Deceit of the Crime Division)

CELLULOIDLAND, The Universe - I Love You Philip Morris is not, alas, a film about a shrinking sect of smokers with a passionate fealty to a large tobacco conglomerate who rebelliously use machetes to hack off the hands of the antismoking fanatics who fan those hands in front of their own scrunched-up noses to signal their disdain for cigarettes, cigarette smoke, free will, responsible choice, and anything else that gets in the way of their desire to dictate to others how they should live.  
   Instead, it is a romantic comedy-drama (a "comma"?) about a pair of gay guys. Steven Russell, played by Jim Carrey, is an incorrigible con man. Phillip Morris, played by Ewan MacGregor, is a trusting Southern soul. The two meet and fall in love in prison, where each is serving time for something or other. (Who, in the end, cares why they're behind bars? Life is short; we're all going to die someday. Tracking details of this or that movie's plot is, you might agree, simply too exhausting.) 

   The film is sweet and mildly enjoyable, excepting a scene which for First of All sabotaged the whole thing. 
   In it, Mr. Russell appears to be dying of AIDS. In a wrenching phone call, Mr. Morris, though angry with Mr. Russell for other reasons, sobs wildly when he learns of his lover's illness. For those of us who lost friends to AIDS in the eighties and nineties, the scene is a knife to the heart. 
   Later, it is revealed that Mr. Russell's "illness" was faked. It is another con, one that allows Mr. Russell, posing as a lawyer, to try to spring Mr. Morris from prison. 
   (Oops. Did we spoil the film for you? So sorry.)
   For the AIDS scene to work, the audience must feel Mr. Morris' agony. So the film tricks us in the same way that Mr. Russell tricks Mr. Morris. When the con is exposed we feel Mr. Morris' rage--he slaps Mr. Russell's face--and his exasperation with Mr. Russell's iniquitous duplicity. 
   First of All understands this filmic conceit. You know what? First of All does not care. It is a terrible manipulation of the audience. We found ourselves weeping at Mr. Morris' pain; we recalled our own in the same kinds of situations. So for the illness to be exposed as fake--well, for hours after leaving the theater we boiled at the film's aggressive guile. 
   In fairness, we note that the film is based on true events. Perhaps Mr. Russell's AIDS con did, in fact, happen.
   Still.   


   A side note: Mr. Morris and Mr. Russell's relationship does not last. In this sense theirs is no different from many nongay couplings. Love, sad to say, does not conquer all. Gays and lesbians eager to marry, in prison our out, need take note.
   
   

Love is All Around (Gay/Lesbian Relationship Breakups Division)

SAN FRANCISCO, Ca. – A workshop is being offered here to provide guidance to lesbian and gay couples whose relationships are ending, and not a moment too soon, if organizers are to be believed, and why shouldn't they be? They, after all, are the experts.

  The Bay Area Reporter, a free weekly newspaper (“Serving the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities since 1971”), noted in a May 6 piece that the first session of the two-part course was Friday (May 8). The second will be Saturday, June 5.

 The appealingly named Judy Appel, the executive director of Our Family Coalition, the coordinating organization, told the paper, “Our families, like all families, go through all the same cycles of meeting and getting together and having relationships, and unfortunately, sometimes breaking up.”

  She added, referring to mismatched state laws regarding same-gender marriage and domestic partnerships, “There’s [sic] definitely complicating factors that heterosexual couples don’t have to think about. … We have to work so hard to build recognition of our relationships that sometimes we’re reluctant to talk about the breakups.”

  This is true. Heterosexuals, who allegedly revere the state of holy matrimony, have made it easy on themselves to get out of it. Gays and lesbians eager for the day when same-gender marriage spreads across the land need take note.

  (And if their relationships are crumbling, they can visit www.ourfamily.org, a URL for which we would create a hyperlink if hyperlinks didn’t disappear with dispiriting regularity from this blog, something about which the good folks at Google have some explaining to do.)

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Lesbian Boobies Division)

SWANSEA, Wales - A Swansea woman named Sharon Hancox, forty, spent her first night of wedded bliss in the slammer, but not for marrying her lesbian partner, Nicola Hutin, also forty. 
  Indeed, Swansea apparently is so sophisticated that a lesbian wedding occasions the batting of nary a local eye. 
 What troubled authorities, according to a March 23 report in Metro, a free United Kingdom weekly, forwarded to us by an Oxford, UK spy, is that immediately after the happy nuptials Ms. Hancox took it upon herself to drink eight pints of lager at the reception, held at a bar called Champers. Thereafter, she and her betrothed displayed a disquieting sort of aggression, or, in lay terms, acted like drunken idiots. 
  (In the United Kingdom, "champers" is short for champagne, although plainly Ms. Hancox is more of a lager kind of gal.)

  First, Ms. Hutin exchanged punches with an inebriated woman. 
  (Metro repoter Joel Taylor writes that Ms. Hutin was in "a fight." Perhaps, then, we are embellishing slightly. It is an unfair generalization that fighting lesbians ipso facto throw punches, although it does create a pleasing mental image.) 
  A bar security man named David Jenkins broke up the fight, and asked the entire wedding party to leave the bar. 
  At that point, Ms. Hancox confronted Mr. Jenkins. Apparently a Champers regular, she accused Mr. Jenkins of having "attacked" her in the past. 
  "You assaulted me, you pulled my tits out two years ago," is the elegant way Ms. Hancox is reported to have put it. 
  She then allegedly pulled down her red dress top, exposing her mammaries. This could be considered a  service to boob-hounds the world over, but apparently is not the sort of thing that flies in Swansea. 
  As it happens, things didn't end there. Ms. Hutin lunged at Mr. Jenkins at about the same moment that Ms. Hancox swung her stiletto heel at him. Whatever else may be said about them, it seems safe to say that Ms. Hancox and Ms. Hutin sure know how to party. 
  Referring to the stiletto incident when speaking later to Swansea magistrates, and using the affectless language typical of verbal and written communication in the legal system, a prosecutor named Julie Sullivan said, "The heel made contact with his [Jenkins'] forehead and he felt blood running down his face." 
  Ms. Hancox admitted common assault and received a yearlong community-service order. She is also required to pay a costs totaling two hundred and fifty British pounds.
  Two things need to be noted. 
  First, Mr. Taylor's Metro report is admirably urbane: never once does he raise an eyebrow at the notion of a lesbian wedding. And the story's copyeditor must be applauded for creating this alluringly alliterative headline: "Bride bares breasts and bashes bouncer."

   Second, the holy institution of matrimony has expanded, at least in Swansea, to include so-called alternative couples. Ms. Hancox and Ms. Hutin are to be commended for showing that gays and lesbians are just like heterosexuals, at least when it comes to getting trashed at wedding receptions, attacking bouncers, and winding up in the can. 

  Gays and lesbians keen to marry need pay close attention. 


  On a side note, the name Swansea is unbearably charming. It conjures images of swans, the sea, and swans at sea, although were it the case that swans went to sea it is possible that seagulls ("gulls at sea"), furiously jealous of the beautiful airborne interlopers, would peck them to death.
  This would be a gruesome sight, but it might make a droll YouTube video. 
   Imagine our disenchantment, then, when we consulted Wikipedia - the lazy man's research resource -  and discovered that the town's name is pronounced SWON-zee, a sound closer to that of a sneeze than of a hissing sea and screaming mutilated swans. 

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (My Husband The Pimp Division)

ROCKFORD, Minn., March 20 -- A local man named Clinton Danner was arrested at a Chicago hotel Sunday after authorities learned he was prostituting his wife via Craigslist ads, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
   His wife, whom the AP didn't name, told authorities that Mr. Danner would arrange the encounters, after the completion of which she was expected to deposit her earnings into his bank account. She said her husband told ther that if she failed to comply with his scheme, she would never see their young son again. 
   Mr. Danner, who is thirty-two, faces a felony charge of pandering. He is being held on a $150,000 bond.
   People like Mr. Danner are examples of why heterosexual marriage should come under strict review, and sooner rather than later. Obviously, some straights can't handle their allegedly beloved institution of matrimony. And yet they deem it prudent to legislatively "protect" it from same-gender couples who love and cherish each other. 
   Gays and lesbians pressing for the opportunity to marry need pay attention. 
   

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Virtual Weaning Division)

SEOUL, Korea, March 5 - After nearly six months on the run, a Korean couple was arrested last week for allowing their child to die of malnutrition even as they raised a virtual child in an online game, the Associated Press reported on March 5. 
   Kim Yoo-chul, forty-one, and Choi Mi-Sun, twenty-five, became unreasonably mesmerized by an online game known as Prius. (This is not to be confused with the automobile of the same name, which, although it saves on gas money and protects the environment, has been shown to have a questionable braking system, and therefore tends to smash into things with alarming regularity.)
   The AP wrote: "The pair were obsessed with raising their internet child, called Anima, resulting in the neglect of their unnamed real daughter." 
   A Korean police officer told the local press that the couple, jobless and dispirited over having given birth to the baby prematurely, only fed the child - the barely living, barely breathing one, that is - when not at an Inter-nets cafe engaging in twelve-hour online gaming sessions. 
   "Online game addiction can blur the line between reality and the virtual world," Professor Kwak Dae-kyung, of Dongguk University, in Seoul, told the local press, and one is hard-pressed not to believe him: after all, as they say, if it waddles, swims and Kwaks like a Dae-kyung, then it probably is a Dae-kyung.
   Child-rearing is a blessed past-time, and is just one of the many delights of holy matrimony, an institution in which some heterosexuals have so little confidence that they feel the need to legislatively protect it. 
   Gays and lesbians eager to tie the knot ought to take note. 

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Sharpest Blade in the Drawer Division)

LAS CRUCEZ, New Mexico, March 11 - A woman from Las Crucez, N.M. (pop. roughly 95,000) has been charged with three counts of aggravated battery against a household member, and a separate battery count, for allegedly stabbing her ex-husband after she looked through the call history of his cellular telephone.
   A March 7 Associated Press story declined to say what she discovered in in the phone. A cursory Google search - one never clicks past the first page, because one has better things to do, such as napping - shows that other news outlets, including Las Crucez television stations, are as lazy as this reporter: all ran the AP story, so details about the telephone's contents remain sketchy all across the World Wide Web (www.).
   The story is full of suggestive details, however, each of which seems a perfect springboard for a novel (or, these days, a Twitter posting).
   "According to police," the AP writes,"[the woman] and her 29-year-old ex-husband were at her home late Thursday when she became upset after looking through his cell phone's history."
   (This information appeared in the second graf - that's newspeak for paragraph - of the AP story. The AP did not write "[the woman]." They wrote "Shaw," indicating that this was the woman's Christian name. But the first graf does not give her full name. This is an oversight of monumental proportions, and points to the appalling state of American journalism. If you can't trust the AP, whom can you trust?)
   Why, one wonders, were they at her home? They are, for goodness sake, ex-husband and -wife. One would think it prudent, not to say preferable, to maintain a good deal of distance between oneself and a second party under those circumstances. Alas, those enjoying, or who have enjoyed, "a union between a man and a woman" have their own ways, some of which are mysterious in the extreme. 
   The AP quotes detectives as saying that the mysteriously one-named Shaw, who was mysteriously enjoying (enduring?) the company of her ex-husband, became enraged at the mysteriously un-reported, and deeply mysterious, contents of her husband's portable telephone. Not altogether mysteriously, she drew a knife "and started swinging at her husband, striking him at least three times."
   His injuries were, according to the AP, "not life-threatening." Perhaps if the couple had still been married, the woman would have tried harder to do serious damage to the man she had taken for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death did them part. After all, if death did them part, the contents of his carry-around telephone would be moot, now wouldn't they?
   Plainly, heterosexuals take seriously the institution of marriage. Even after disrespecting the sacred institution by bailing on it, they are so drawn to the one to whom they pledged their troth that, when the loved one disobeys, they feel compelled to stab the shit out of them. 
   Gays and lesbians waiting for the blessed day when same-gender marriage rights become available should take note.

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (End of Days Division)

PATERSON, New Jersey, March 11 - A fifty-one-year-old New Jersey man is preparing to stand trial five times, one for each of the daughters he allegedly raped repeatedly, three of whom he impregnated and who gave birth to a total of six children, the Associated Press reported today.
   According to the man's wife, he was sure the world would soon end, and therefore thought it prudent to create a "pure bloodline" by impregnating his daughters. Prosecutors in Passaic County told the AP that one of the daughters was raped as late as 2002, shortly before the wife left the man and took the children with her. The daughter was in her early teens at the time.
   In testimony, one daughter, the AP reports, "described experiencing and witnessing beatings administered with wooden boards and steel-toed boots." She added that the man would punish even the most trivial transgressions by withholding food.
   The children were home-schooled and not allowed to socialize with peers.
   The man faces twenty-seven charges, including many related to sex crimes. His first trial is scheduled for April. More sordid details - there's only so much one can write without becoming dispirited - are in the AP story.
   This situation calls into question the notion, promulgated by conservative social critics and lawmakers, that for marriage to remain "a union between a man and a woman" is better for the children. Plainly, some heterosexual men see "family" as their own personal cult. 
   This point should be noted by gays and lesbians eager to enter the sacred institution of matrimony. 
           --30--


NOTE (March 12, 2010): This story is updated here.

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Statistical Evidence Division)

   A report recently released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that, in America, marriages last longer than non-marriage cohabitative relationships, a phrase this reporter just made up.
   According to a March 2 Reuters report, the CDC study suggests that seventy-eight percent of marriages last five years or more. Less than thirty percent of what the CDC, unlike this reporter, calls "cohabiting unions" (making it sound like the unions themselves are cohabiting, something that hasn't happened since the days of Jimmy Hoffa) last the same amount of time. 
   The study was based on a nationally representative sample, whatever that is, of 12,571 American men and women. 

   Normally, one prefers to go to the source - to dig beyond the Associated Press or Reuters - in order to flesh out blog items. But the CDC report, available here, runs forty-six pages, forty-five-and-one-half pages longer than that for which one has any patience a 'tall. 
   However, gays and lesbians enthused about marrying might want to study the report. They'll find nothing about themselves in it, of course. But they will amass interesting conversational fodder for when they dine with their heterosexual counterparts and try to convince them that gay people are just like they are, and therefore should be allowed to marry. 
   This, of course, is a canard. Gay people are irrevocably different from straight people by virtue of being well-groomed, well-spoken and well-mannered, and of having a capacity for sexual relations the deviance of which is quite rightly thought to be a danger to the safety of the women and the horses. 
    

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (False Alarm Division)

   A handful of devious souls - no one yet knows how many - set up a Web site advertising a fake bridal show, to be held at Boston's Hynes Convention Center, and bilked thousands of individual bridal enthusiasts and bridal-merchandise vendors out of many, many, many dollars, the Associated Press reported yesterday.
   The site, Boston 411 (which disappeared from the Inter-nets Monday night), advertised a Spring Home and Bridal Show. Registering couples were charged between ten and fifteen dollars, with the promise that they would "receive a welcome bag of goodies and... be entered for a chance to win fabulous gifts and prizes!" 
   Human nature is funny, and trust is the imperative that keeps us all from killing each other (though not from making fun of each other from time to time). Still, a person who falls for any pitch that includes the phrase "fabulous gifts and prizes" could be said to be getting what's coming to him. The exclamation point alone should have been a tip-off. 
   Authorities told the AP that vendors paid up to $4,000 to participate in the (non-)event, which the phony Web site described as "New England's biggest and most extravagant Bridal Show!" 
   See? Another exclamation point. And capitalizing "bridal show" - is that not, right there, criminal behavior? 
   But the con-people, you understand, know their audience. Few are those as enthused as those about to enter into holy matrimony. They are a bilkable lot. Gays and lesbians eager to marry should take note. 
   On the other hand, for those who, in these desperate economic times, are in search of sure-fire ways to get rich, same-gender marriage provides perfect front-end and back-end opportunities. Study to become: a.) a wedding planner; or b.) a divorce lawyer. 

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (If I Had a Hammer Division)

   On May 4, 2007, Amy Teresa Ricks, of Salt Lake City, obviously a good and caring wife, drove her husband, Joel, to her mother's condominium, where she told him she had a "surprise" for him. 

   She walked him down to the basement and blindfolded him. Then she repeatedly bashed him on the head with a hammer. 

   Joel Ricks, who suffered minor injuries, later told sheriff's deputies that sleeping bags had been spread on the floor where Amy guided him to stand. Nearby, a nine-inch kitchen knife was encased inside a plastic bag. 
   This suggests that: a.) after conking out her husband, Amy Ricks planned to disembowel him (perhaps hoping to fetch a premium black market price for his internal organs?); or, b.) the Rickses enjoyed a fetish-heavy intimate life about which neither of them enlightened investigators. It seems sad that we will never know. 
   Amy Ricks, who is thirty-seven, was charged Tuesday with second-degree felony attempted murder and a third-degree felony aggravated assault, according to a report Wednesday in the Salt Lake Tribune. Ms. Ricks' attorneys plan to say she is a victim of Battered Spouse Syndrome. At first glance, that seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. But relationships are mysterious; only the people within them know the truth. The Tribune notes that Rickses, though separated, are still legally wedded.   

   This makes plain that some heterosexuals so revere the institution of marriage that they feel compelled to respect it by staying with the spouse who, mere years before, they did their best to kill or maim.  
   Gays and lesbians eager to marry should take note. 
   

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear Division)

   Nathan Lewis, of Lewiston, Idaho, apparently is a charming old-school romantic. 
   The Associated Press reported on Feb. 19 that Lewis, twenty-one, was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in Lewiston on his wedding night. After being released on bail, he returned to his home in Clarskton, Wa., and, being the gentleman that he is, assaulted his wife, allegedly slapping and choking her.   
   Obviously, marriage is a sacred and holy institution taken seriously by those who enter it. No wonder gays and lesbians want to be a part of it.