Nancy Reagan (1921 - 2016)

Nancy Reagan, who was born Anne Francis Robbins but went by the stage name Nancy Davis, has died at age 94. From the New York Times obituary:

Mrs. Reagan was a fierce guardian of her husband’s image, sometimes at the expense of her own, and during Mr. Reagan’s improbable climb from a Hollywood acting career to the governorship of California and ultimately the White House, she was a trusted adviser.

“Without Nancy, there would have been no Governor Reagan, no President Reagan,” said Michael K. Deaver, the longtime aide and close friend of the Reagans who died in 2007.

Mrs. Reagan helped hire and fire the political consultants who ran her husband’s near-miss campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 and his successful campaign for the presidency in 1980. She played a seminal role in the 1987 ouster of the White House chief of staff, Donald T. Regan, whom Mrs. Reagan blamed for ineptness after it was disclosed that Mr. Reagan had secretly approved arms sales to Iran.

Behind the scenes, Mrs. Reagan was the prime mover in Mr. Reagan’s efforts to recover from the scandal, which was known as Iran-contra because some of the proceeds from the sale had been diverted to the contras opposing the leftist government of Nicaragua. While trying to persuade her stubborn husband to apologize for the arms deal, Mrs. Reagan brought political figures into the White House, among them the Democratic power broker Robert S. Strauss, to argue her case to the president.

Mr. Reagan eventually conceded that she was right. On March 4, 1987, the president made a distanced apology for the arms sale in a nationally televised address that dramatically improved his slumping public approval ratings.

His wife, typically, neither sought nor received credit for the turnaround. Mrs. Reagan did not wish to detract from her husband’s luster by appearing to be a power behind the presidential throne.

In public, she gazed at him adoringly and portrayed herself as a contented wife who had willingly given up a Hollywood acting career of her own to devote herself to her husband’s career. “He was all I had ever wanted in a man, and more,” she wrote in “My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan,” published in 1989.

He reciprocated in kind. “How do you describe coming into a warm room from out of the cold?” he once said. “Never waking up bored? The only thing wrong is, she’s made a coward out of me. Whenever she’s out of sight, I’m a worrier about her.”"

In truth, she was the worrier. Mrs. Reagan wrote in her memoirs that she sometimes became angry with her husband because of his relentless optimism. He didn’t worry at all, she wrote, “and I seem to do the worrying for both of us.”

I always thought it was a little unfair how much she was made fun of for her "just say no" campaign against drugs. I actually think the reminder that you can always just say no can be pretty effective.

Here's Nancy Reagan on 60 Minutes in 2002, talking about living with a husband who has Alzheimer's disease:




The New York Times notes that Nancy helped Ronald write his poignant statement to the public about Alzheimer's:

I have recently been told that I am one of the millions of Americans who will be afflicted with Alzheimer's Disease. . . .

At the moment I feel just fine. I intend to live the remainder of the years God gives me on this earth doing the things I have always done. I will continue to share life's journey with my beloved Nancy and my family. I plan to enjoy the great outdoors and stay in touch with my friends and supporters.

Unfortunately, as Alzheimer's disease progresses, the family often bears a heavy burden. I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience. . . .

I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.

Now that the Supreme Court has recognized same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, does it follow that there must be a right to polygamy?

Of course, some people are quick to make that argument today — like Fredrik deBoer, who writes in Politico:

Now that we’ve defined that love and devotion and family isn’t driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals? The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy . . . .

In Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissenting opinion, he remarks, “It is striking how much of the majority’s reasoning would apply with equal force to the claim of a fundamental right to plural marriage.” As is often the case with critics of polygamy, he neglects to mention why this is a fate to be feared. . . .

[P]rogressives who reject the case for legal polygamy often don’t really appear to have their hearts in it. They seem uncomfortable voicing their objections, clearly unused to being in the position of rejecting the appeals of those who would codify non-traditional relationships in law. They are, without exception, accepting of the right of consenting adults to engage in whatever sexual and romantic relationships they choose, but oppose the formal, legal recognition of those relationships. They’re trapped, I suspect, in prior opposition that they voiced from a standpoint of political pragmatism in order to advance the cause of gay marriage.

In doing so, they do real harm to real people. Marriage is not just a formal codification of informal relationships. It’s also a defensive system designed to protect the interests of people whose material, economic and emotional security depends on the marriage in question. If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners, how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?

Polyamory is a fact. People are living in group relationships today. The question is not whether they will continue on in those relationships. The question is whether we will grant to them the same basic recognition we grant to other adults: that love makes marriage, and that the right to marry is exactly that, a right. . . .

Conventional arguments against polygamy fall apart with even a little examination. Appeals to traditional marriage, and the notion that child rearing is the only legitimate justification of legal marriage, have now, I hope, been exposed and discarded by all progressive people. What’s left is a series of jerry-rigged arguments that reflect no coherent moral vision of what marriage is for, and which frequently function as criticisms of traditional marriage as well.

Well, I'm sorry, deBoer, but you're missing something. Oh, I admit your argument has a certain appeal on the surface: how can we say a policy that excluded people from the institution of marriage based on their gender or sexual orientation was unconstitutional discrimination, without saying the same thing of a policy that excludes people based on their number? If it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, straight or gay, then how can it matter whether you're 2, 3, 5, 10, or 50 people?

But polygamy is significantly different — even assuming for the sake of argument that we have no concerns about coercion or power disparities within any given polygamous relationship. As my mom, Ann Althouse, explained 9 years ago:

Legal marriage isn't just about love, it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.

The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.

But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.

UPDATE: My mom sees a problem with her own argument from 9 years ago, in light of the majority's reasoning in Obergefell.

ADDED: Judge Richard Posner points out another important distinction:

[P]olygamy imposes real costs, by reducing the number of marriageable women. Suppose a society contains 100 men and 100 women, but the five wealthiest men have a total of 50 wives. That leaves 95 men to compete for only 50 marriageable women.

MORE: Jonathan Rauch observes:

[T]he case for gay marriage is the case against polygamy, and the public will be smart enough to understand the difference.

Gay marriage is about extending the opportunity to marry to people who lack it; polygamy, in practice, is about exactly the opposite: withdrawing marriage opportunity from people who now have it. Gay marriage succeeded because no one could identify any plausible channels through which it might damage heterosexual marriage; with polygamy, the worries are many, the history clear, and the channels well understood.

UPDATE: My mom responds to those quotes by Posner and Rauch:

I've got a problem with that! Talk about a male perspective! What about the women who want to choose to share one man? They should be denied to preserve a pool of marriageable women for all the extra males that would otherwise have scarce pickings? Are women some kind of natural resource to be conserved for the benefit of males?

As the old saying goes: Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. If women think they are better off as multiple wives to one high-quality male, why should they be cut off from that way of life so that some less-desired male will have better odds of getting a woman for himself? Is this everybody-gets-just-one theory of marriage some kind of welfare program for undesirable males?

I can see that society fears its renegade young male and would like to tame them through marriage, leveraging the power of their sexuality lest they expend that energy in acts of violence and dissolution. I can see the idea of using women for this purpose and rejecting polygamy because it takes women out of commission in that service. . . . But if you use that as your overt argument, you're going to run up against ideas about women's autonomy and freedom. We're not society's tools.

UPDATE: Jonathan Rauch expands on his argument against polygamy.

How marrying on "instinct" replaced "reason"-based marriage, and what to do about it

One of the nine thought-provoking points made in this article:

Five: Instinct has too much prestige

Back in the olden days, marriage was a rational business; all to do with matching your bit of land with theirs. It was cold, ruthless and disconnected from the happiness of the protagonists. We are still traumatised by this.

What replaced the marriage of reason was the marriage of instinct, the Romantic marriage. It dictated that how one felt about someone should be the only guide to marriage. If one felt ‘in love’, that was enough. No more questions asked. Feeling was triumphant. Outsiders could only applaud the feeling’s arrival, respecting it as one might the visitation of a divine spirit. Parents might be aghast, but they had to suppose that only the couple could ever know. We have for three hundred years been in collective reaction against thousands of years of very unhelpful interference based on prejudice, snobbery and lack of imagination.

So pedantic and cautious was the old ‘marriage of reason’ that one of the features of the marriage of feeling is its belief that one shouldn’t think too much about why one is marrying. To analyse the decision feels ‘un-Romantic’. To write out charts of pros and cons seems absurd and cold.... The recklessness at play seems a sign that the marriage can work, precisely because the old kind of ‘safety’ was such a danger to one’s happiness.

Why don't economists promote marriage?

Megan McArdle has the answer:

College improves your earning prospects. So does marriage. Education makes you more likely to live longer. So does marriage. Yet while many economist [sic] vocally support initiatives to move more people into college, very few of them vocally favor initiatives to get more people married. Why is that ... ? ...

[A]ll economists are, definitionally, very good at college. Not all economists are good at marriage. Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad. Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad. And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.

Penelope Trunk on why universal pre-school is a bad idea, and what would be better

Penelope Trunk says this (I recommend reading the whole thing to get her full argument with links):

Kids with educated parents do not need to go to preschool. So preschool primarily benefits kids with uneducated parents. Preschool can help those kids start out on equal footing with kids of educated parents.

Children who have educated parents should be playing when they are preschool age. They learn through play. They do not need to learn to sit still and stand in line and play only when the teacher says play.

The idea that kids should learn to read, write, and add when they are very young has been thoroughly disproven, and in fact, this sort of structured environment is so bad for boys that it puts them on an early path to being labeled low performers. This is why the rich don’t even bother with preschool—they know their kids will be fine without it. ...

Here is my proposed solution. First, promote marriage. Yes, it’s judgmental and pushing cultural values onto individual citizens. But so is universal pre-K. Marriage, however, is much more successful at giving kids a good chance in life: keeping a marriage together decreases the chance of a child living in poverty by 80%.

And let’s go after deadbeat dads. The majority of low-income kids are not living with their dad. I do not believe that low-income moms are different than high-income moms; I think l0w-income moms also would choose to be home with their kids over working full-time.

New York City increased the amount of child-support collected by 50% in the last ten years. We can use the same tactics across the country.

“There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.”

So said the English writer William Somerset Maugham, as quoted by the Washington Post's Alexandra Petri, who has a list of "Things Americans Would Rather Think About Than Newt Gingrich’s Open Marriage."

(However, as long as we are thinking about it, my understanding is that he never had an open marriage. According to his second wife, he asked her for an open marriage, she rejected it, and he cheated on her anyway.)

Have educated women stopped getting married?

Nope.

Newt Gingrich calls same-sex marriage "temporary."

Gingrich says:

“I believe that marriage is between a man and woman. . . . It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate."

A headline on TalkingPointsMemo gives the obvious response:

Just Like His Own Marriages

And here's a recent Bizarro comic:

"It’s not having children that isolates people."

Could the New York Times "Well" blog have quoted a more ambiguous statement?

The quote and the whole blog post is supposed to be a vindication of being single, but you could easily take the quote out of context and make it say the opposite.

Do married men engage in less antisocial behavior because marriage tames them?

Or is there a "selection effect," i.e. men who are less antisocial (as in antisocial personality disorder, not as a synonym for "asocial"!) are more likely to get married in the first place?

Turns out the answer is: both.

Why divorce?

Today's New York Times Magazine has a piece about Dana Adam Shapiro, who, when he was in his mid-30s, interviewed all his friends he knew who had gotten divorced. He then asked each of them for referrals to other divorced couples. Almost everyone was happy to talk to him about their divorce. He's now making a movie (not a documentary) called Monogamy based on the interviews.

The article sums up three of the couples Shapiro interviewed: "The Young Wife," "The Two-Time Ex," and "The Adultress."

So, what lessons do we learn from the article? It turns out that marriages fail due to adultery, alcoholism, sex starting to feel like a chore, people taking less care of themselves, and the realization that what they had in common from the beginning was too superficial to be a strong basis for a lifelong commitment. Stop the presses!

It's disappointing if those are the most interesting insights from 50 interviews with "people of all ages, all across the United States" about their divorces. There isn't one unexpected observation in the whole piece.

If you like the "Here are a few paragraphs about a couple and their problems" format, I recommend, instead, a book called One to One by Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D. Here's one of my favorite vignettes from the book (102-104):

Lionel and Lisa

This couple was seen by their friends as "glittering, beautiful, fun-loving." . . . When asked how things were with them, their inevitable answer was "Great!" . . .

They gave large cocktail parties every three or four months and ate out frequently with friends, of whom they had many. In actuality, few of their "friends" knew very much about them except that they were good-looking, fun, and obviously successful. . . . [T]hey took pains to avoid any kind of "heavy talk," on the few occasions when they ate out alone. . . .

The fact is, there was very little openness, tenderness, trust or intimacy, caring or kindness between them, or between them and anyone else. . . . This is an example of two highly narcissistic, shallow people who affected a pose for the outside world but who had very little tolerance for each other. . . .

They . . . used history between them only to seek further evidence for recrimination. "Do you remember," said Lisa to Lionel, "the time two years ago when you forgot my birthday?" Interestingly, their sexual lives were satisfactory in terms of arousal and response, but neither Lionel nor Lisa was aware of any love or tenderness during sex. . . . [I]n view of their great similarity, and their high degree of narcissism and alienation, they got through the barrier of antagonism sexually by seeing each other as mirror images of themselves. . . . [T]hey engaged in masturbatory or solitary sex, even though it took place together. . . .

They came to see me, not to get help, but to use me to support them in their onslaught on each other and to win me over to believing that each was right in hating the other. . . . I do not know whether they parted company or continued on an antagonistic basis. Antagonism can keep people together in a state of mutual pseudo-aliveness for a lifetime.

Happy first anniversary to my mom and stepdad!

One year ago today:

Ann Althouse said...

Commenting from a mountaintop: we are still sitting on the rock where we exchanged rings, and now we are married.

8/3/09 3:59 PM

Later in the day on August 3, 2009, she explained:

This afternoon, we drove from our hotel in Bachelor Gulch to the Office of the Clerk and Recorder in Eagle County, where we showed our driver's licenses, answered a few questions, paid $30 cash, and got a license that empowered us to marry each other. We drove up Bellyache Ridge — just the 2 of us — where we did things our way and solemnized the marriage on our own. Then, we did the additional red tape — filling out the bottom of the Certificate of Marriage and handing it back to the county official who'd asked us the questions earlier. . . .

One thing I love about American federalism is that — subject to the limitations of national law — individual states can do things their own way, and we can move around finding the law we like. We decided against marrying in Madison, because under Wisconsin law, not only do you need to pay $125 or so for the license and then go get a minister or a judge to perform the wedding — you have to wait 6 days between getting the license and doing the wedding. What's that all about? It's insulting, not to mention avaricious. We went west, out of the grip of a paternalistic state, for greater freedom and individuality.

And, yes, we think same-sex couples should also have the right to marry. You'll have to travel somewhere other than Colorado if that's the freedom you want. We traveled and got what we wanted, and obviously, we have the additional benefit of getting a marriage that will be recognized everywhere. I hope the day will come when the Coloradan attitude that favored us will smile on gay people too. But for now, I'm just really happy to be married in Colorado, on Bellyache Ridge, with just me and Meade on the scene. Aptly, it turned out that there was a big old cell phone tower on top of the ridge, so we texted and emailed and telephoned.

And I made a blog comment — a comment, not a post, because that's where I found my dear husband, in the comments.

Earlier this year, someone posted this question to AskMetafilter about whether to have a wedding when she and her fiance got married:

I'd so much rather save the money we'd use on a wedding and have a months-long honeymoon, but I also don't want to kick myself in a few years. Has anyone ever exchanged vows in the most basic way possible and ever regretted it later?

There were a lot of good answers in that thread, but the best one was my mom's answer:

My husband and I married each other, alone together on a mountain in Colorado — where the law lets you do that. It was only last August, but I haven't regretted it yet. It's true that if you don't throw a wedding, you won't have wedding memories, but why assume that those memories would be so great? Maybe some bad or disappointing things would happen, including all the effort you put into trying to make sure the memories would turn out good. And all that effort could instead be put into real love and the beautiful details of your normal life together. There are so many memories to be had: Why try to manufacture conventional wedding-type memories, when the best things that happen to you might occur the next time you go for a walk or eat breakfast or go to bed with your husband? Today.

Opposites attract...

...unfortunately.

What should you do with your last names when you get married?

My mom (Ann Althouse) talks about deciding what to do with names when she got married to my stepdad (Laurence Meade):

What did Meade and I do, you may wonder? Well, we're not making any more children — unless we're given a miracle — so the "family name" issue was absent. I didn't change my name the first time I married, back in 1973, and I've already gone through all the struggles of not having the same name as my sons. I had to sit silently while the judge who granted my divorce lectured me about the problem of women not changing their names. He presumed to opine — based on zero evidence — that my failure to change my name was a causal factor in the divorce.

I kept my name a second time. Why? #1: My sons have the middle name Althouse, and I care about that identification. I'm also damned used to my name after all these years, and I've made it slightly famous. Of course, I could keep using Althouse professionally and still have Meade as my legal last name, but I can also do the reverse and use Meade in practice for any purpose aside from signing various documents. And, as that last point reveals, Meade didn't change his name to mine either.

A while ago, a married woman who had taken her husband's last name asked AskMetafilter if she should change her name back — she said her new name "doesn't feel like me." She added, "Maybe when we have kids I'll feel differently?" That last point jumped out at me, so I answered:

I haven't been married, but I have been a kid whose parents kept their own names. Their solution was to give us our dad's name as the last name, and our mom's name as the middle name. (This is not bound by gender — others in my family have had their mom's name as the last name and their dad's name as the middle name.) I'm glad that I get to use both of their names. I think it subconsciously gave me the message that men and women are distinct individuals — the woman's identity doesn't get submerged into the man's. So I'd change your name back because, not in spite, of having kids.

Another anecdote... I know a woman whose maiden name is easy to spell and pronounce, and she took her husband's unwieldy last name when they got married. Years later, she decided to run for elected office but felt it would work better to go back to her maiden name. She filed the forms to legally change it, and only later told her husband. He was shocked and said: "I can't believe you changed your name without bringing me along to join you!" From then on, they've both used her maiden name as their last name.

FLASHBACK: "What's my maiden name?"

Congratulations!

It's official:

Ann Althouse said...

Commenting from a mountaintop: we are still sitting on the rock where we exchanged rings, and now we are married.

8/3/09 3:59 PM

Details...

Why gays are lucky to be marriage-free, according to Michael Scott

There's an episode of The Office from a couple years ago (Season 3) where the boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), calls a meeting to reveal that one of the other employees is gay. Predictably, he uses the opportunity to lecture the office about homosexuality, and he says this:

MICHAEL: Gay marriage currently is not legal, under U.S. law. I bet a lot of straight men wish that applied to them -- so they could go out there and have some torrid, unabashed monkey sex, as much as they could. You know, that sounds pretty good, right?

KEVIN: That sounds great.

I've watched that episode many times, and I've always laughed at that interchange because of how cheerfully Michael has become convinced of his own fallacious reasoning. But no one would say something so dumb in real life, right?

Well, the Weekly Standard saw fit to print this argument by Sam Schulman, in a piece entitled, "The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage":

[M]arriage changes the nature of sexual relations between a man and a woman. Sexual intercourse between a married couple is licit; sexual intercourse before marriage, or adulterous sex during marriage, is not. Illicit sex is not necessarily a crime, but licit sexual intercourse enjoys a sanction in the moral universe, however we understand it, from which premarital and extramarital copulation is excluded. More important, the illicit or licit nature of heterosexual copulation is transmitted to the child, who is deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on the metaphysical category of its parents’ coition.

Now to live in such a system, in which sexual intercourse can be illicit, is a great nuisance. Many of us feel that licit sexuality loses, moreover, a bit of its oomph. Gay lovers live merrily free of this system. Can we imagine Frank’s family and friends warning him that “If Joe were serious, he would put a ring on your finger”? Do we ask Vera to stop stringing Sally along? Gay sexual practice is not sortable into these categories—licit-if-married but illicit-if-not (children adopted by a gay man or hygienically conceived by a lesbian mom can never be regarded as illegitimate). Neither does gay copulation become in any way more permissible, more noble after marriage. It is a scandal that homosexual intercourse should ever have been illegal, but having become legal, there remains no extra sanction—the kind which fathers with shotguns enforce upon heterosexual lovers. I am not aware of any gay marriage activist who suggests that gay men and women should create a new category of disapproval for their own sexual relationships, after so recently having been freed from the onerous and bigoted legal blight on homosexual acts. But without social disapproval of unmarried sex—what kind of madman would seek marriage? ...

Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage—much less three, as I have done—were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom. There would be very few flowerings of domestic ecstasy were it not for the granite underpinnings of marriage. Gay couples who marry are bound to be disappointed in marriage’s impotence without these ghosts of past authority....

Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system—a system from which you have been spared. Imitate our self-surrender. If gay men and women could see the price that humanity—particularly the women and children among us—will pay, simply in order that a gay person can say of someone she already loves with perfect competence, “Hey, meet the missus!”—no doubt they will think again.

How do you think his wife -- or his ex-wives -- feel about this article?

To be clear, the above block quote is not a parody. The Weekly Standard is one of the most respected conservative periodicals, and it published this in all seriousness.

(Thanks to Isaac Chotiner for pointing out the Weekly Standard article in TNR, and this site for The Office dialogue.)


UPDATE: A comment on my mom's blog pointed out that I never actually explained my objection to Michael Scott and Sam Schulman's reasoning. Here's my response, for those who'd like to see this spelled out:

Let's concede the point that there are a whole lot of men out there (of all sexual orientations) who would rather have unrestrained, promiscuous sex than be tied down by being married. Does it follow that men are more fortunate if they're gay? Of course not, because straight men aren't forced to get married! Men who want promiscuous sex so much that they'd rather not be married are in the same position whether they're gay, straight, or bisexual: they just shouldn't get married. For those men, the legality of marriage is a wash. But there are still plenty of men, of all sexual orientations, who would rather be married. Among that group of men, the ones who want to legally marry a woman are in a more fortunate situation than the ones who want to legally marry a man, since the former but not the latter are allowed to do what they want.

"Commoner Captures Princess, Blog Version"

Uh, wow.

UPDATE: Annotated.

The liberal time machine, part 1: same-sex marriage

Liberals have an odd tendency to artificially compress the timeline of history in order to exaggerate present-day burdens.

For example, Courtney Martin is a straight liberal who writes in The American Prospect about her refusal to get married as some sort of ill-advised protest against ... well, she seems to be protesting a huge cauldron of assorted social ills: racism, homophobia, gender roles, patriarchy... I'm getting worn out just listing all of America's evils.

What's Martin's problem with marriage? Click the link for the whole explanation, but this point is especially ludicrous:

I don't want to participate in an institution that's been historically sexist and currently discriminates against my gay friends, especially considering that my partner and I couldn't have been married in some states just 40 years ago (we're miscegenators)....

I can't think of a more glaring example of the tendency of liberals to willfully blind themselves to social progress. If one of your main gripes with society today is something that ended forty years ago, you're really lucky!

Martin's attempt to depict marriage as a racist institution despite Loving v. Virginia is unintentionally comical:

But the institution is still constructed in subtle ways to fit best with same-raced, preferably white, couples. Imagine a traditional wedding in which two white families are sitting on either side of the aisle. Now imagine a wedding in which one side is completely white and the other completely black. See the problem?

James Kirchik (the author of the above-linked blog post about Martin's article) has the right answer:

No, I don't. Sounds like a wonderful example of America's exceptional multiculturalism to me.

But even if you do have a problems with that specific tradition, don't blame the government -- blame ordinary people. They're the ones who choose to practice those traditions. The government doesn't care what you do.

If Martin really believes seating arrangements in interracial marriages are a "problem," she could just ... solve the problem by getting married without having "a traditional wedding." No one's forcing you to do things the way they're done in movies.

But that implies that she's arguing in good faith -- that she'd love to make society better, and has unfortunately been thwarted by the man. Well, that's hard to believe. For liberals like Courtney Martin, politics isn't about solving problems at all. It's about wallowing in them.