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Monica Yant Kinney: Jon & Kate, paragons of traditional marriage
So Jon & Kate are kaput. The fate of the Berks County couple, reality TV's Bickersons, was known months ago by anyone who watched their tragicomic TLC series. The stress of raising eight children didn't doom them. The self-inflicted spotlight did.
Jon got hair plugs, Phillies tickets, and a kid-unfriendly sports car in exchange for whoring out his family. Kate received a tummy-tuck, a dye job, and hate mail for being such a shrew. Now the Gosselins are getting divorced. The biggest losers on this televised meltdown? Those adorable kids.
Thankfully, slightly more substantive conversations about love and marriage are under way in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey statehouses, though much of the talk remains divorced from reality.
In the Garden State, Gov. Corzine finally came around on the idea that all people should be entitled to smash wedding cake in each other's faces and test their fate on cable TV. Until recently, the happily divorced Corzine thought civil unions were good enough for gays, because his religious upbringing said marriage is for man and woman.
As my colleague Jonathan Tamari reported Sunday, Corzine arrived at his epiphany at the start of a reelection fight against Chris Christie, a Republican former U.S. attorney.
Corzine now boasts at rallies that separate is not equal when it comes to the God-given right to register for stemware at Crate & Barrel. And yet, the governor dodged Tamari's repeated requests for a one-on-one interview on the issue. Why?
Corzine may have changed his mind about matrimonial matters, but not saying how or why allows an important evolution to look like crass political convenience.
Meanwhile, Western Pennsylvania State Sen. John Eichelberger (R., Blair) thinks same-sex marriage will turn a sacred institution into a freak show. I guess he never watched Jon & Kate.
Eichelberger seeks a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between "one man and one woman," because he believes same-sex unions will lead to three-way weddings and child brides.
"The cause of the day is same-sex marriage," Eichelberger said Friday on WHYY's Radio Times. "Five to 10 years from now, it'll be polygamy, marrying younger people."
Listeners who didn't immediately drive into a telephone pole were treated to an at-times-comic debate between Eichelberger and State Sen. Daylin Leach (D., Delaware), backer of competing legislation providing equal marriage rights to same-sex couples.
What right-minded lawmaker, Leach countered, would draft a bill allowing 6-year-olds to marry?
"It won't be a 6-year-old," Eichelberger responded, in total seriousness. "It will be a 15-year-old, then a 14-year-old, then a 13-year-old . . . "
Eichelberger also thinks allowing two gay men to wed paves the way for straight men taking five wives.
"When I debated Vince Fumo," Eichelberger claimed, "he acknowledged that using the same logic, polygamy would be next."
That prompted host Marty Moss-Coane to redirect the inanity.
"We all know," she said drily, "what happened to Vince Fumo."
The soon-to-be-sentenced corrupt former state senator is twice divorced, is estranged from his adult daughter, and used state funds to snoop into his son's mental-health records. Fumo is hardly the guy to be cited in defense of anything.
Seeking a break from Eichelberger's far-fetched theories, I rang up Leach for a postmortem on their marriage debate.
"Look, we draw reasonable lines all the time," Leach told me. "You can drive 65, not 95. You can have a gun, you can't have a truck bomb."
"The reasonable line allows every person to marry the one non-married consenting adult they want to marry. No one needs to marry their lawn mower."
Agreed, but just think - what a great reality show that would be.
Contact Monica Yant Kinney at 215-854-4670 or myant@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/yantkinney.
