In Trying to Prevent Gay Marriage, Texas May Have Accidently Abolished it for Everyone

When I was a kid in Catholic school, probably around 6th grade, I remember reading a short story about a little girl who studied the violin. The details are hazy but someone, I think her teacher, told her that another student was getting the gift of a new violin and that there were two to choose from but he didn't know which to pick. He asked the student to help him out by trying both and telling him which one was better.

After playing both the girl knew that the first violin was far and away the superior intstrument, but knowing she would soon be in a competition with the other student she said the second, lower-quality violin was better and that that one should be the gift.

The gift turned out to be for her. She ended up getting the bum deal she was trying to give someone else.

The nuns didn't use the word "karma" but that's what the story was about. Do unto others. Etcetera. You seldom see morality plays as swiftly and compactly played out in real life but when you do it's delicious.

And there may such an instance in store for Texas where, in trying to deprive some people of marriage ... the state may have abolished it for everyone.

A Texas lawyer and candidate for attorney general, Barbara Ann Radnofsky, has found a little screw-up in the legal wording of some 2005 anti-equality legislation that passed overwhelmingly in the state. Here's the skinny from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

The amendment, approved by the Texas Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by Texas voters, declares that "marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." But the trouble-making phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares: "This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

Radnofsky says the wording "eliminates marriage in Texas."

It may be waved away as a piffling error made by lawyers who are too highly paid to make such mistakes but I hope it stirs up a hornets nest of problems and that the people who voted for such childish, no-I-won't-share end up with their "sacred" unions treat as null-and-void, exactly as they'd like to do unto others.

Maybe we can get the girl in the story to play them the world's tiniest violin.