Krauthammer on icky gays …

Witness, as Krauthammer argues, simultaneously, that we don't need to amend the Constitution to keep them dirty homos from getting married -- yet -- while also asserting that every specious, wing-nutty argument the homophobes employ in the marriage debate is spot-on*.

It's what makes him the best.

On Wednesday the Senate fell 18 votes short of the two-thirds majority that would have been required to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The mainstream media joined Sen. Edward Kennedy in calling the entire debate a distraction from the nation's business and a wedge with which to divide Americans.

Since the main business of Congress is to devise ever more ingenious ways (earmarked and non-earmarked) to waste taxpayers' money, any distraction from the main business is welcome.

Well, yeah, I guess it's better for the Congress to debate pointless Constitutional amendments than wasting taxpayers' money. On the other hand, they could be dealing with, I dunno, the 45 million Americans without healthcare or any of a dozen other real problems we face. But, either way.

As for dividing Americans, who came up with the idea of radically altering the most ancient of all social institutions in the first place?

Hmmm, tough question. The idea that women had rights within marriage -- that marriage was more than a contract for human chattel -- originated in ancient Egypt, at least in theory. "The most ancient of all social institutions" was widely polygynous until ancient Greece -- although concubines were the norm for fashionable Athenians. The idea that marriage requires a formal ceremony, with a cleric and witnesses and stuff like that only dates back -- in the West -- to the 16th century, so maybe the guilty party is the Council of Trent, which decreed in 1563 that marriages should be celebrated in the presence of a priest and at least two witnesses.

The institution of marriage has been so fluid, and has been 'radically altered' so many times in so many fundamental ways that it's almost impossible to pinpoint who came up with the idea "in the first place."

You get the picture, but let's see where the Krauthammer's going with it:

Until the past few years, every civilization known to man has defined marriage as between people of opposite sex.

That stands in stark opposition to all those civilizations not known to man -- the pixies, leprechauns, hobbits and those folks from Atlantis. They marry willy-nilly -- hooking up with sirens, mermaids and wood nymphs of varying genders -- and their moral relativism has put them on a slippery slope; they're destined to destroy themselves in hedonistic orgies of bloody cannibalism.

To charge with "divisiveness" those who would do nothing more than resist a radical overturning of that norm is a sign of either gross partisanship or serious dimwittedness.

I would have said "dimwittitude," but I'm grossly partisan.

And that partisanship and dimwittedness obscured the rather interesting substance of the recent Senate debate. It revolved around the two possible grounds for the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment: federalism and popular sovereignty.

More accurately, the Senate debate revolved around whether banning same-sex marriage would preserve Western Civilization As We Know It, or was just more Republican pre-election pandering.

But I'll give Charles a bit of credit here: he makes quick work of the states' rights argument, pointing out that the Defense of Marriage Act --DOMA -- prevents same-sex marriage from jumping from state to state, and there's no reason to think it'll be overturned anytime soon, especially with the Supreme constituted as it is today.

Which brings us to the crisp cookie of lucidity in the middle of Krauthammer's reactionary nougat:

Once the constitutional amendment is passed, should the current ethos about gay marriage change, no people in any state could ever permit gay marriage.

That's exactly right, and CK knows that in 20 or 30 years those arguing against gay marriage today are going to regret it as much as those who argued against interracial marriage a few decades ago.