More Good News!

This would have been a good day to stay away from the newspaper.

Our esteemed vegan bishop, Gerald Kicanas, really really wants Arizona to pass the constitutional amendment that will outlaw marriage equality. No surprise there. What piqued my interest a bit was one of the loops of his convoluted reasoning.

"The purpose of this proposition is to assure the fact that in the state of Arizona, the institution of marriage, as from time immemorial, is a relationship between one man and one woman," he said.

When asked how that definition reflected the Old Testament of men with multiple wives, Kicanas said, "The reality is there have always been people who have lived in common-law relationships or perhaps have polygamous relationships.

"But that doesn't necessarily change the understanding of the institution of marriage because there are other possibilities."

Well, the reality is that there was plenty of God-sanctioned polygamy in the Old Testament, and that there's plenty of the same right now in other countries (which, amazingly, also claim to both know God and have his go-ahead for taking multiple wives). And the bishop seems to think that the existence of those "other possibilities," those competing models of marriage, don't threaten the understanding of one-man, one-woman marriage at all. If it's not a stretch for him to say one man-many women doesn't change his understanding of marriage, it's not a stretch for me to say that one man-one man or one woman-one woman shouldn't change it either.