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Well, you can, but why bother?

Turns out that our recent spate of marriage equality on the Left Coast has—predictably—led to right-wing outrage and the introduction of yet another federal marriage inequality amendment.

S.J. Res. 43, dubbed by its proponents as the “Marriage Protection Amendment,” would amend the U.S. Constitution to limit marriage to the “union of one man and one woman.” What’s more, it specifically prohibits the federal government and all the states from offering any of the benefits of marriage to anyone who is not a couple composed of “one man and one woman.”

There go all domestic partnerships, civil unions, etc. ad nauseum.

Fortunately, this crap would have to go through the whole brou-ha-ha required to amend the U.S. Constitution, and we know how complicated that is—look at what happened to the E.R.A. (Equal Rights Amendment) a couple of decades ago.

But the funny thing is that two of the co-sponsors of this crap are…wait for it…Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID).

Nope, you can’t make this stuff up.

Those two would be a couple of classic examples of “traditional” marital values in practice. Sen. Vitter (also known as “Diaper Dave” for his apparent fondness for infant garb in sexual situations) was the guy who got caught in the “D.C. madam” prostitution scandal, and who can forget the uproar about Sen. Craig’s (just call him “Wide Stance”) arrest for solicitation of prostitution in a Minneapolis airport men’s room?

Oh, yeah. These guys can protect marriage. Just stay away from mine, please.

(The photo is my new favorite bumper sticker, available from Liberal Values.)

UPDATE, Monday June 30: Craig and Vitter’s attempt at “protecting” marriage caught the attention of Democratic Underground, and they’re number one on this week’s list of the TOP 10 Conservative Idiots. 

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But no, they’re not.

The headline on a celebratory press release from the Liberty Counsel regarding yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to strike down Washington, D.C.'s ban on handguns was—no kidding—"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!"

The Liberty Counsel, a right-wing, religiously based legal organization (founded by seed money from his late wingnut-ness, the Rev. Jerry Falwell) is one of those that filed a lawsuit to stop the enforcement of the California Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision. Today, the organization’s founder said in the press release about gun control: “’Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’ is the best way to describe today‘s decision. The right to self-defense is a liberty at the core of the American Revolution. It was ordinary people who defended life and liberty against organized tyranny."

Uh, couple of problems with that. The phrase “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” is taken from the title of a song by Frank Loesser, written in 1942 and based on the tale of a chaplain who took over a ship’s gun following the deaths of the gunner and the gunner’s mate during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The song has nothing at all to do with individuals keeping and using guns; it’s about fighting when necessary and saving your prayers for later.

Now, it just happens that I’m one of those rare left-leaners who think that the right to keep and bear arms might be a good thing for liberals to practice, mostly because the idea of all the guns belonging to folks whose idea of logic begins and ends with “You’ll take my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" scares the bejesus out of me.

Nonetheless, the idea that God wants us to carry guns is a bit of a stretch. I mean, wouldn’t he have planted a firearms tree in the Garden o’ Eden if he’d intended us to be packing all the time? Still, I’ve always wondered whether God uses hollow-points.