THOUGHTS
Last week in writing about marriage, I spoke about keeping promises because the children are watching us. Indeed they are watching and what they saw this week in the Kansas Senate was a lesson in deception they will not soon forget. There were children in the gallery on Thursday . . . the day the Senate killed marriage as it has existed for thousands of years. The death was not painless nor was it swift. The children watched a death agony that was exquisitely played out by a cast of players that danced around the death bed with masks of compassion and tolerance but who administered the final blow that ended it all. The death blow came in the hands of a final amendment; the administration of the cup of hemlock that would finish the patient off because the players were tired and wanted to move on to "more important matters." The children watched as one senator held the floor in an orchestrated and quite excellently executed drama which was designed to confuse and mock ordinary Kansas citizens who had taken the time and the effort to make their wishes known to their senators about protecting marriage as an institution.
The drama
The drama was intricate and cleverly interspersed with humor for this senator is well known to be affable and to have a good sense of humor. Humor and condescending irony was invoked while marriage is being attacked on all sides. The attack comes in the form of a virulent cancer of relativism and tolerance for alternative groupings of people who want to called themselves married, but instead of protecting it with a constitutional definition for marriage as the union of one man and one woman with all the privileges and benefits of that union reserved for marriage alone, this senator and his team of actors chose to leave the institution under attack and vulnerable. This was done with the solemn assurance that marriage is already protected in Kansas and with a wink and a smile at ominous warnings in other states that marriage will continue to be systematically attacked. Not to worry, said he and others, Kansas is well-protected by its own Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA); that there is no need for additional protection�as if the cancer that is subverting the legal status of marriage in other states would miraculously avoid Kansas in its relentless march across the country.
Mocking and ridicule
This senator not only mocked the idea that Kansas was at risk but ridiculed the pain and agony of the patient. Marriage is in trouble, not because as an institution it is obsolete; it is in trouble because people do not keep their promises. The result of that is a weakened immune system that opens marriage to attack by opportunistic invaders. Rather than extol the virtues of the institution this senator chose to deride the seamier sides of it . . . the 55-hour marriage of Britney Spears, the domestic abuse and divorce that so often occurs . . . in other words . . . this patient is really not worth saving. My forty-two year marriage and those of many in that room paled in comparison to the sensational side of marriage that is all too often in the papers. Perhaps it is too boring to contemplate successful marriages for this senator . . . certainly there is far less drama in quietly-led responsible lives committed to each other than what this senator used as examples.
The "medicine man"
The children watching in the gallery saw the "medicine man" dancing around chanting incantations of compassion and quite nice-sounding reassurances that the patient will recover only when it submits to dying so that it can be reborn into a new entity . . . a more "inclusive" entity that makes it unrecognizable and meaningless. When some in the Senate chamber objected to this bizarre treatment, the Senate rules were invoked and the second opinion was silenced. The children saw a series of meaningless placebo amendments offered with the real medicine of an up or down roll call vote tossed down the drain.
The poison pill
When the poison pill came, there was no way to help the patient because all the remedies were exhausted, and in fact, so were those of us who were watching. Like watching someone you love die in pain, it was almost a relief to have it over. Except for one thing . . . if marriage dies then our culture dies too . . . and the life we know dies with it.
The children are not fooled
At least one child in the audience really got it . . . he was quite aware of what was going on. He whispered that to one of our group as we sat and watched this terrible scene played out. He knew that the whole exercise was for the benefit of those who fear men; who do not have the courage to face the surgery that is necessary to excise the cancer and protect the patient. He also saw that this exercise was to avoid telling the next of kin what really happened that day. What a sad day for marriage and for Kansas.
The children watched and they were cheated . . . the people of Kansas weren�t there but they were deprived of a chance to determine their own course of treatment by a few senators who were unwilling to accept a life-threatening diagnosis and do what is necessary to save marriage.
In Him,
Judy Smith
State Director