I’ve been iffy on whether or not to blog the whole Britney thing – on the one hand, its an obnoxious non-story that pushed Sharon’s advocacy of an independent Palestinian state off of Headline News; on the other hand, its a delicious microcosm of everything that’s wrong with celebrity. However, Andrew Sullivan’s take on the whole affair is just so right that it would be a crime not to link to it:
Look, I know some of you will object to the logic, but can you not see how something like Britney Spears’ insta-marriage in Las Vegas might infuriate long-committed gay couples who, even now, don’t have a shred of the rights Ms Spears enjoyed for a few days? It is one thing for people to declare their commitment to traditional marriage – i.e. procreative, life-long, heterosexual. It is another thing when that ideal has almost no relationship to civil marriage as it now exists for straights; and when it is nevertheless used to deny gay people access to the institution. Over the holidays, I found myself watching all those VH1 list shows, and happened across the top ten or twenty (I forget which) shortest Hollywood marriages in history. Ha ha ha. We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something “sacred” (in the president’s words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please. Can we have a smidgen of consistency here?
Listen, I know that those of us on the right are divided between paleo-cons and neo-cons and that it’s important for electoral reasons not to fracture the delicate coalition that we have. Fair enough – I make sure I know what Derbyshire is writing just like I’m supposed to. But not granting gays civil marriage when heterosexual civil marriages last all of 55 hours and then get talked about for the rest of the week as newsmaking events? That seems to make no sense, and it risks deflating our big tent.
