Here in the frozen wastelands of New Hampshire, a state representative is introducing a bill that would repeal same-sex marriage and, seemingly to gain support, conflates it with incest. Although incest is already illegal, this bill would somehow make it more illegal. His rational is that marriage is supposed to make babies and he is trying to save the Earth’s rapidly diminishing population. (That would be the mirror-universe Earth I presume.) It’s my belief that peoples’ brains contract when they are exposed to cold temperatures for too long, and it’s been dipping to -25 degrees fahrenheit this winter. Perhaps come Spring, Representative Bates will see the absurdity of his bill. At least it’s given me something to blog about. Here is my response, sent to the local newspaper:

To the Editor:

Rep. David Bates has proposed a ban on civil unions, same sex marriage and incest in order to guarantee that more babies are born. This bill doesn’t go far enough. We need to bar anyone with a vasectomy or who has had their tubes tied from getting married. Hmmm… in fact, there should be a fertility test to qualify you for marriage. Since allowing gay people to marry will somehow reduce the number of straight people having babies, by that same brilliant logic old people should not be allowed to get married. In fact, marriages should be annulled after people past child-bearing age. And since Rep. Bates has identified a major epidemic in New Hampshire with people marrying their children, I believe we should add to the list furniture marrying. I mean, if my chair and my couch were to get married, they may have a foot stool as a baby, but they’d never bear human offspring.

The thinking behind the bill – that letting same-sex couple get married would stop other people from marrying and having children is flawless. In fact, when I found out that my sister was married to a woman I told my wife not to get pregnant and that our marriage no longer counted. With the current population crisis – there are only about 6 billion people in the world and rampant starvation isn’t growing fast enough – we can’t afford people getting married who might have to artificially inseminate to make children or worse, adopt!