Brutally Honest Rant - 06/07/06

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: The REAL Threat To Marriage
Audio Transcripts
06/07/06

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – "American Idiot Remix" – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening, and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Do you know what’s the difference between a politician and a prostitute?

Well obviously there’s a gender difference. There are more male politicians than there are female politicians, and there are more female prostitutes than there are male prostitutes.

And of course there’s the fact that prostitution is illegal everywhere in America EXCEPT for certain places in Nevada… while politics is, unfortunately, legal EVERYWHERE.

But there is one distinct and fundamental difference between a politician and a prostitute, and that difference rests with one word… "over".

A prostitute will screw people for money... and they don’t even have to be good at it. They could even HATE it, but they’ll still do it for the money. And if they are good at it, you can’t help but to remember it because it will be one of the best screws in your life!

But a politician will screw people OVER for money. And not only will they get paid to do it, but they will even LOVE doing it! And if they’re REALLY GOOD at doing it, the people getting screwed OVER will never realize that they were!

Well folks, America is getting SCREWED OVER and getting SCREWED OVER GOOD by the doofus in the White House!

You see, the White House has decided this week to come to the rescue of marriage… an institution that George W. Bush CLAIMS to be under attack from what he calls "activist judges". And the ONLY remedy to supposedly "SAVE" marriage is to change the US Constitution to prohibit marriage from being anything other than a man and a woman.

You see… the doofus-in-chief believes that "activists" shouldn’t be in the judicial branch of government. They should instead be on church pulpits, on Fox News, and working for Karl Rove to come up with more cute campaign slogans like "I’m a uniter not a divider", and "I’m the decider." The president feels that the only people that should be judges are ass-kissers who will simply rubber-stamp any rule or law he imposes. Don’t question, just obey. In fact, that should be the official motto for the White House under George W. Bush: DON’T QUESTION, JUST OBEY.

But I digress here…

Anyway, I have a REALLY SERIOUS problem with the Bush Imperium’s entire declaration about marriage AND the threat it faces AND why the Imperium feels they have to spend even one breath of corrupted air on the matter.

First, we have some SERIOUS problems in this country to deal with! We have a serious problem with immigration. We have a REALLY SERIOUS problem with the Congress spending money like there’s no tomorrow, and the President has YET to exercise even ONE SINGLE VETO in his entire time in office to try to keep spending in check. We have a HOSTILE energy policy in this country, with gas prices going up and down depending on which oil robber-baron sneezes. We have an economy that is just two years away from another recession, but nobody in the federal government – including the Federal Reserve Board – wants to recognize it. We have Homeland Security being run by Grand Moff Tarkin and the Marx Brothers. And… oh… yeah… Osama bin PigBastard and his band of international terrorists are still out there threatening us!

And you want to tell me that ALL of these things somehow take a back burner to the issue of supposedly "SAVING" marriage??? Anyone who believes that line of bull should just go ahead and line up right now so they can be given their required reality-jarring smack upside the head. In fact that kind of delusion might even require two or three smacks upside the head.

And of all of the things in the world that could supposedly threaten the "institution of marriage", it’s a sure bet that having two guys or two girls getting married are pretty much on the bottom of the list.

You want to know what REALLY hurts marriage?

Let’s start with the Alternative Minimum Tax. Nice little tax abuse concocted to supposedly "punish" rich people, but really hurts working married couples that decide to file jointly. There’s no clear determination of who gets this tax torture, but it’s up to the IRS to make the final call on it. How would you like to have that kind of threat looming over your happy marriage?

You want to know what hurts marriage? How about the changing of the rules about banks and bankruptcy? We get this continual push to put everything on credit cards. Take a loan out, take two, take three or four if need be, consolidate your loans, refinance your loans, and then change the rules so that if you can’t keep up, you’re screwed!

You want to know what hurts marriage? Trophy wives! You get into a relationship for better or for worse, and then when some corporate executive’s career takes off, he leaves his wife – the woman who stuck with him during his salad days – and marries some flat-belly eye-candy half his age.

How about the marriage of celebrities? Everyone is obsessing over movie stars that get into relationships, get married, pop out some tax deduction, and then get divorced so they can start the cycle up all over again. That hasn’t exactly been helping out this so-called "all-important institution" too much!

I’m not saying that DIVORCE hurts marriage, but marriage as simply being a matter of personal or financial convenience is sure as hell a threat to the institution! Divorce is just a symptom of that problem. The so-called "starter marriage" idea, which has really become a way of life in places like here in the South, is a SERIOUS threat to the institution.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep on saying it, our obsessive compulsive push just to GET married is a SERIOUS threat to marriage itself! We have women who have been brainwashed into believing that their end-all, be-all purpose in this world is to get married! The big celebration, the big ceremony, the dress, the cake, the rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, the reception, and it all has to be PERFECT! It all has to fit this unrealistic Barbie Dream Bride fantasy of theirs, and this one event could very well be about as expensive and as stressful as having your kids and putting them all through college at the same time. No wonder why we have so-called "Bridezillas" and "Runaway brides".

And it’s not just women either. Men also are getting very subtle, very subliminal messages from family, friends, and society in general that we’re not good enough to be in society without first finding someone and marrying them. It’s a very subtle and very ANTI-INDIVIDUAL message that I believe has caused much of the problems in marriage as well. Things like the "seven-year itch" and the midlife crisis and the urge to stray from a relationship are ALL caused by this pressure to get married soon, get married quickly, and to pop out tax exemptions.

And that brings us to the BIGGEST group behind this great social dysfunction when it comes to marriage… RELIGON. And here we find the real instigators and agitators when it comes to this non-issue.

Let’s get brutally honest here… this whole "gay marriage ban" issue is nothing more than an obscenely demagogued RED HERRING! It’s a HOAX! It’s a CON-JOB! It’s got absolutely NOTHING at all to do with marriage and EVERYTHING to do with the death-grip religious groups have in society.

Marriage is a religious concoction. It was created for the purpose of giving religious groups power over the masses. Since THEY were the ones who determined who would get married, and under what circumstances, religious groups were able to maintain monopoly power over that community. But that only applied as long as there was only ONE religious belief, ONE religious organization in that community, and as long as church and state were equally wed and merged into one.

But as soon as we started talking about separating church and state, and as soon as we started talking about religious freedom for OTHER religious beliefs, then we started to take away that monopoly power. And nobody really figured it out until recently, but once marriage became a matter of the STATE instead of the CHURCH, that took away any and all claims religious groups had to determine what constitutes a marriage in society.

So this is their last grasp of that monopoly power. It is without a doubt one of their huge cornerstones in society, and they certainly don’t want to give it up because it only goes downhill from there. It’s like KFC giving up their secret recipe.

So they’ve got three choices. The first is to accept the inevitable and know that while they obviously oppose the idea, that gay and lesbian marriages WILL become a reality. That choice is unacceptable for them. The second option is to find some way to get the state OUT of the marriage business and return it to purely RELIGIOUS control. That is actually a REALISTIC option, but then they’d have to wrest that power away from the government, which doesn’t give up power any more than would organized religion. Plus it further cements the whole separation of church and state thing, which they still refuse to exist even when it smacks them upside the head.

And then there is the third choice, which is to fabricate a phony social crisis and then put Machiavellian pressure on politicians to act on it… which is what they HAVE been doing, right up to today’s Senate vote on the proposed constitutional amendment, which failed by less than a majority, never mind the two-thirds support needed.

And bear in mind that I personally have NOTHING to gain in this issue, except for the fact that I support FREEDOM and that’s what this issue is as far as I’m concerned. It’s a FREEDOM issue. This is a matter of FREEDOM from a habitually repressive organization, and if helps to show them spit bullets and expose their true nature to the world, then it’s even all the better.

So let’s get it right out in the open… this effort to ban gay and lesbian marriages has got NOTHING to do with the "sanctity of marriage" and EVERYTHING to do with keeping that last grip of power in the hands of organized religion! Marriage as an institution has survived King Henry VIII’s multiple wives, it has survived Marilyn Monroe’s multiple husbands, it has survived Anna Nicole Smith’s sugar daddy marriage, it has survived the quickie marriages and annulments of both Britney Spears and Carmen Elektra, it has survived the multiple marriages of conservative icons like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, AND it has survived the TWO YEARS that gay and lesbian marriages existed in the state of Massachusetts. It’s a pretty safe bet that marriage as an institution will go on LONG after every single one of these conservative moralists and theocrats fail in their efforts and they themselves shuffle off this moral coil. And it won’t survive BECAUSE of these social mullahs… it will survive IN SPITE OF THEM!

In the meantime, though, I have nothing but a scathing condemnation for Republicans and for the Bush Imperium in particular to pulling this dead horse issue out for the moralists to beat on. You have shown America your true agenda, and it is as corrupt and as divisive as you can get it.

And a word of advice… the next time you want to impose your moralist agenda, you might want to lay off the whole "I’m a uniter not a divider" rhetoric. That kind of false advertising will only come back to kick you in the nut-sack.

(Computer – a few appropriate clips that you’ll have to hear to know what they are.)
(Fade Music In – "Impend" by Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori)

In going over the political stories for the week, there was one little story that probably went unnoticed by most people… and it was this: the immigration reform package that the White House was pushing just a few weeks ago all of a sudden started to make headway in the Congress. But this didn’t happen until AFTER the Bush Imperium pandered to the moralists on this whole "gay marriage ban" issue.

So you have to wonder… if this was such an important hot-button issue for the Congress to deal with, WHY didn’t it have any political traction until AFTER Bush Junior pandered to the moralists? Was there some backroom Machiavellian mischief going on? A little quid-pro-quo? In the political world of deal-making, that kind of an arrangement was possible. The signs of that appeasement were certainly there… if you knew where to look.

Remember what I said about that difference between politicians and prostitutes… prostitutes will screw people for money, while politicians will screw people OVER for money. And this issue is certainly a true-to-form political screw-job if there ever was one.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production, all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/"End of Recording")

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