Getting Politics Out of the Bedroom

If you check out Zennie's post below, you'll see that at a campaign stop in Nashville, TN, on Monday, John McCain was asked about "gay marriage . . . in the context of the preservation of marriage." The question came from a citizen at a town hall meeting who gently raised the issue of McCain's own infidelity, wondering how infidelity as a whole is compatible with the notion that marriage is so sacred as to be off limits to the gay community.

It's a good point. Conservative estimates put the percentage of married Americans who stray around 22%. That's at least 1 in 5. Imagine your neighborhood. Now imagine that 1 in 5 of those homes contain a spouse who is having an extramarital affair. That should put things in perspective.

With so many Americans turning outside their marriages for affairs, is the town hall questioner correct that marriage is not quite the sanctified union in America that it used to be? Further, with religious affiliation on the decline in the United States, how representative of the culture at large is the idea of a sanctified union?

The issue of gay marriage is, at best, complicated. The question is who is best to legislate it? Should we allow politicians with their own histories of violating the sacred unions they vow to uphold, like John McCain, into our bedrooms to legislate who we may marry and enter into unions with? Or should we leave those decisions to the more impartial court systems? Or, better yet, put them to vote? Surely a country where 1 in 5 married people cheat, a country slowly turning away from the notion of sanctified marriages in the religious context, would be able to see past the sanctification issues and allow all people, regardless of sex, to declare their love for each other with all rights and priveleges of traditional legal marriage.

As Zennie correctly points out, this will not be the last time that John McCain is confronted with the infidelity and, by extension, character issue on the campaign trail. I think that this questioner showed that this will also not be the last time he is confronted on the gay marriage issue. When politicians can prove that they can take care of the issues in their own bedrooms, I might entertain the notion of letting them think about what goes on in mine. Until that time (never), they need to get back to legislating about important things, like this war, this struggling economy, the prescriptions too expensive for my mother in law, and the standardized testing my daughter is still taking on the next to last day of school.