My thanks to Scott Braddock of KRLD 1080 for having me on his Nightly News Roundup Tuesday night.

Braddock refereed between me and Gary Nolan on the subject of Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean's now-famous answer to a pageant judge's question about same-sex marriage. The controversy wasn't Prejean's words but the later, nasty reaction from the judge and his allies.

As the audio tells, Nolan and I agreed that in an ideal world, government ought not to be involved in defining marriage. However, we don't live in an ideal world.

Braddock gave us a generous chunk of time to hash this out. Still, there are a few points I wish I'd had time to make:

• Marriage is organic. It pairs man and woman as they are made. The church institutionalized this, and the state followed suit.
  
  
• Natural law is critical to the recognition of marriage. To redefine marriage as anything other than one-male-one-female doesn't follow natural law. So at the outset, the concept of same-sex marriage is morally disadvantaged. It has no inherent value to warrant state (or church) recognition.
  
  
• Furthermore, neither the church nor any civilized state recognize polygamy, which also contradicts natural law because it awards more than one female to a male.

Let me elaborate on polygamy, because its history illustrates so clearly what happens when we disregard natural law in favor of mere "want."

By nature, humans are created male-female at roughly a 50-50 ratio. Consequently, in a polygamist society, many males—namely the least wealthy and powerful—will never marry. With no place in society, these "lost boys" end up as poorly educated exiles with no support from their family. It's a recipe for a life of nihilism.

It is no coincidence that of the 19 young men recruited to carry out the 9/11 suicide missions, 15 were from the polygamist state of Saudi Arabia.

So, to preserve the peace, the state simply must follow the church in defining marriage as spelled out in natural law.

a thoughtful host, braddock posed a question I didn't anticipate: Wasn't the nastiness directed at Prejean similar to that vented toward the Dixie Chicks some years back when their lead singer took a cheap shot at President Bush during a concert?

Something about that metaphor didn't sit right with me. On reflection, I'd say it would have been more apt if the Dixie Chicks were compared to Prejean's questioner.

Prejean didn't ask to talk about gay marriage on the Miss USA stage. It was a pageant judge who introduced politics where no one ever had before.

Natalie Maines also hauled a hot political matter into a forum where her fans didn't expect it—the entertainment stage. For that, she and her band got a reaction they well could have anticipated. They cannot claim to be victims of others' intolerance any more than President Bush could if he were jeered for breaking into a song at his State of the Union address.

So I'd put the judge, not Prejean, in the same category as the Dixie Chicks—one who violated his audience's trust by misappropriating a forum.

Unfortunately, Prejean was his innocent victim, unwilling to speak anything other than the truth, and she suffers for it.

As did the savior she follows.

Posted by: Michael Rittenhouse at 09:04 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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