Making Amends...

by Albert Danforth, Roving Historian

One of the most ridiculously unnecessary vote-magnet "issues" to crop up in the political conversation in the last ninety years or so is the debate over amending the United States Constitution to ban gay marriages. Regardless of one's religious, moral, spiritual and/or personal stance on homosexuality, the contention over a nationwide constitutional ban over gay marriage is patently ludicrous. The Constitution is not, should not, and can never effectively be the battleground for a moral cock-stomping contest.

The Constitution was established by this great nation's founders for the expressed reasons to establish limits on government with respect to the rights of the individual and parameters regarding the individual's rights and responsibilities to participate in government, as 25 of the 27 amendments demonstrate. The other two amendments revolve around the only attempt for the United States Government to restrict the rights of the individual at the federal level: the 18th which established the prohibition of alcohol, and the 21st which repealed Prohibition only 14 years later due to its spectacular failure of which its most emblematic feature was cementing the influence of the Mafia on American daily life for the next fifty-plus years.

Before the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors was made illegal on January 16, 1920, the Mafia was little more than the town council for large cities' Little Italies, largely flexing their criminal muscle only in their ethnic enclaves. Once Prohibition got enacted, however, an underground black market developed for alcohol and the Mafia proved an effective and efficient agent to garner a supply for the burgeoning demand. The monumental booze wealth amassed by the fabled crime syndicates over the next dozen years allowed them to expand their influence into the greater cities at large and the suburbs, as well as diversify their operations into the gambling-and-loan, prostitution and narcotics trades. An overly-ambitious top-heavy foray into organized labor eventually lead to the Mafia's downfall in the mid-1980's, reducing their influence mainly to the inner-city vending and waste-removal sectors and HBO series - at which point the Mafia's bastard Prohibition-sired country cousin NASCAR picked up the influential slack.

One can only logically deduce that a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage would thusly create similar black-market heroes of the downtrodden, rapidly building their influence in American politics and culture taking decades if not centuries to absolve. Unless you are prepared to damn your childen and grandchildren to a lifetime of knuckling under to Capoes Blaine "Prince Albert" Colagiacomo and Marcel "Under Bear" Vigliorini, enforcers Rudolfo "Rusty Trombone" Alligheri and Arnold "Dry Crack" Fiorino and/or a plague of media coverage dedicated to Miata-based left-turn festivals, I would strongly recommend that virulent segment of self-Righteous nationwide nannies abandon its attempts to codify morality in our Constitution.