Ohio Puts Positive Spin on Marriage Discrimination

ister, Ohio passed an official ban on gay marriage Friday, making it one of the most swinging states for gay bachelors, but a real bummer for those seeking to settle down. More importantly, however, was the way Ohio Republicans backing the hate-filled measure put a really positive spin on the whole thing, calling it a positive reinforcement of marriage for children and families. Children and families, of course, still not allowed to marry each other.

Gov. Taft, not related at all to former fat president Taft, but certainly could stand to lose a few, signed the bill known among the ignorant as a "defense of marriage" act, following the lead of 37 other states to pass such acts. Ohio's is the nation's most stringent, stressing the refusal to recognize such marriages publicly and even denying unmarried partners of state employees, in heterosexual or homosexual relationships, the right to marital benefits.

Original provisions of the law were scaled back, including requiring anyone involved in a marriage had to love their partner, guaranteed fidelity and honesty between them, and punished with strong fines anyone entering into marriage under "dishonorable" pretenses, including premarital pregnancy, a drunken nuptial, or just doing it for a laugh. Lawmakers quickly recognized 98% of marriages in the state would become illegal and then simplified the measures of the bill.

Rev. Rutherford Haymaker supported the act in its initial stages, and like his colleagues, fears for the state of marriage without such laws in place.

"It's high time Ohio stepped up to the plate to define marriage for everybody out there," claimed a happy Haymaker, drinking a fifth of bourbon with this reporter in a bar of confused sexual origins. "Let's face it—marriage is about to fall apart in this country. Both the husband and wife get to work now, the children are all running 'round unsupervised, and they watch M-TV shows where men kiss other men and their sexuality gets all confused. I got statistics that say over half of the marriages today, the partners actually agreed to marry each other. That's crazy. If marriage isn't prearranged and conducted with improving family relations and passing down property to offspring, what the hell is it for? This is what happens when you kill all your kings and queens, all sorts of confusion erupts. They had a revolution in Russia and now I hear a man can marry a goat over there. It's blasphemous."

Other opponents of gay marriages were slightly more informed, like Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Stuckus.

"It's my sincere hope when the gays realize they can't get married, they'll see how futile it is to be gay and go back to being straight, like we're all supposed to be," Stuckus said. "We've all fantasized about being gay, and having intimate relations with someone else of the same sex in a Shoney's men's room. But eventually we all grow up and stop masturbating to weightlifting magazines and realize it's time to settle down, and we'll never have a viable political career if we head off to join some dance troupe with a guy named Trent."

Misty-eyed, Stuckus peered out the window and added, "Sweet, sweet Trent."

The Ohio bill passed in close quarters to a Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling allowing the constitutionality of gay marriage in that state. Some critics say the ruling is further proof New England has gone "all queer" lately, while others say it was just a drunken night of Supreme Court ruling following the Pats victory last Superbowl Sunday.

aced with tough questions about the economy and pre-war intelligence failures this week, President Bush interrupted a press conference Thursday with an unusual display of astronomical panic.

“Look! Up in the sky!� shouted Bush, pointing upward in mock terror. “We’re all going to die!�

According to White House press secretary Scott McClellan, the airborne terror President Bush cringed beneath before darting out of the room was the “Evil Eye� galaxy, a distant cluster of stars recently photographed by the Hubble space telescope, which according to Bush staffers will soon spell our mortal demise.

“The President cannot stress enough the importance of putting aside divisive squabbling involving lost jobs or unnecessary invasions,� explained McClellan. “Our very lives may be in his hands this day, and it’s time for the American people to band together with the president, now and through this coming November to repel this terrible threat to the American way of life.�

All available scientists and high-school educated adults have dismissed the president’s claims that the Messier 64 galaxy, known as the “Evil Eye� for an unusual appearance caused by stars and interstellar gas rotating in opposite directions, will within the next ten months attempt to suck the United States of America off the globe like a small child sucking the sticker off an orange. While no scientific evidence exists to suggest this is even the remotest of possibilities, President Bush remains steadfast in his message.

“Holy shit, run for your lives!� Bush screamed before ducking out of the room during a press conference on Saturday, shortly after being asked to reconcile conflicting statements he’d made about rolling back last year’s tax cuts.

Political pundits have observed that Bush’s obsession with the M64 galaxy began shortly after the results of a recent AP poll were released, showing the president had taken a sharp nosedive in public opinion after a month of Democratic presidential candidates pointing out his ample flaws. For the first time during Bush’s term, polls showed more Americans likely to vote against the president than for him, and similar polls showed Bush losing to Democratic presidential hopeful and dead man walking John Kerry in head-to-head voting. Bush staffers refute these claims, however, pointing out that Poles are unreliable and often the butt of stereotypical humor.

Other results of the AP polls show Bush’s numbers across the board as down sharply from one month ago, signaling that the president’s attempts to distract voters with fantastical tales of moon bases and Mars adventures were largely unsuccessful and kind of silly.

“Obviously putting a man on Mars didn’t turn people’s cranks as much as the president had hoped,� commented political strategist Vaughn Casey. “So Bush has wisely returned to his ‘Greatest Hits’ playbook in an effort to parlay national paranoia into a second term. It’s a longshot, sure, but if the president could convince average Americans that Al Qaeda actually posed a serious threat in their everyday lives, then I suppose some kind of sucking space monster isn’t really a giant leap of faith from there.�

Further requests to question the president as to the scientific basis of his fears were turned down on the grounds that Messier 64 might be listening.

The president took an honest and sincere step toward covering up the recent questions of intelligence (the CIA's, not his) with his creation of a bipartisan (emphasis on the "partisan") commission this week. But the question remains: Are we supposed to buy this bullshit?

That question aside, and the answer is obviously a resounding "yes," issues still remain about the quality of intelligence the administration is receiving about terrorism. If the CIA thinks there are large deposits of chemical or biological weapons in an underdeveloped nation like Iraq, based, I might add, on some barbershop rumor floating around Nigeria, what does this mean for the safety of the country? Are we pretty much left at the mercy of the incompetence of terrorists? Much like they are left at the mercy of our own incompetence.

It might be easier for the American public if they knew exactly how intelligence is gathered for the purposes of national security. First and foremost, we buy it. Any episode of Starsky & Hutch should display this adequately. Foreign equivalents of Huggy Bears come nosing around our embassies, and back alley deals galore abound.

The second way is the kind we think of it most often: large, burly American national security agents wearing fake beards and dressed in swami hats and Lawrence of Arabia robes. These are the real heroes, the deceitful, backstabbing undercover agents who get the secretest information straight from the horse's mouth by putting their lives on the line in barely plausible disguises. There is no more dangerous job in the world, except for being an employee of Phil Spector. Many is the time some jihad-crazy Muslim terrorist flips out and frisks you to yell out, "Abdul's wearing a wire!" It's all over then, sir.

There is also what the government calls "option three": Kicking in doors of suspected terrorists, arresting them on suspicion and searching their base of operations without warrant. Right now this is still hard to do overseas, with their difficult laws preventing illegal search and seizure, at least in the more Westernized countries and some of the third world, but rollback in constitutionally-guaranteed rights in the states has made it a lot easier to fight terrorism on our own turf. We might have to annex the world before they agree.

So whose balls were dropped on this particular outing? Democrats suggest the administration manipulated intelligence to manufacture consent for an unjustifiable war with Iraq. Plausible, yes, and even the most likely case, which makes it a poor choice to discuss in this column. So I point the blame squarely at the acting schools in this country.

What kinds of intelligence operatives are we turning out? Nervous, jittery young rubes who make poor choices in their acting and offer only an overbaked performance any first-year Hamas fanatic could see through. Our guys show up on their doorsteps, spewing anti-American rhetoric in a British accent because it's all they can do, and the terrorist masterminds of the world are laughing at us. They tell our guys six or seven times a month they're ready to launch a major attack on our soil, when in fact their biggest effort is not to giggle while they discuss fake plans to use dirty bombs and chemical agents.

Hopefully this nine-person distraction Bush is calling a bipartisan commission will get right to the heart of our off-off-Broadway operatives. We're the richest nation on the planet, and our security is something we should not be paying half-price for. I say, shell out the $20 million for Pacino. De Niro, Hoffman, any of these guys. We should at least be able to afford Billy Dee Williams. He was fantastic in Mahogany.

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