Does This Look Like a Degraded Marriage?

This is my wife and I, about two minutes after we got married, at San Francisco City Hall.

There is no doubt that gay marriages have been conducted on the spot where we were standing. In fact there was a commitment ceremony going on about eighty feet from us while we were getting married. Yet according to cultural conservatives, such activity "degrades the institution of marriage".

I throw myself on the mercy of conservatives to look us in the eye and tell us whether our marriage is somehow degraded. (Here's a hint: it's not.) I'm very lucky to have this lady in my life. She hasn't figured out that she got the raw end of the deal, but that's another story.

So, culture conservatives: clearly I don't understand this degradation the institution of marriage is undergoing. We certainly seem to love each other and plan to have kids that we love and raise with strong values, and work hard to give them a good life. So perhaps you can explain it to me. What exactly is it about us that's degraded? Is it something in the way we're standing? Maybe you don't like my tie? Or is it something that can't be picked up on film, like I don't know, microwaves? And how exactly was the degradation transferred to us - is it airborne, like the flu? Or maybe if we wore rubber-soled shoes we were safe, like insulation from electric shock?

I think you get it by now. I'm ridiculing the whole idea that gay marriage somehow denigrates the institution of marriage because the whole idea is beneath contempt.

If you want to somehow legislate heterosexuality and use government to interfere in people's lives, your insistence is not only completely without reason, but you are also directly contradicting conservative values.