Your political lesson for today, by courtesy of profs. Clegg and Barrett.
Comments invited by email to: Barrett.
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SHOW THE
JUDGE YOUR STUFF
By Andrei Codrescu
www.codrescu.com
After
George Bush's constitutional amendment passed [defining marriage as a union of
one man and one woman], there was great confusion in the nation's courthouses
as women in pants and men in skirts tried to prove that they were indeed men or
women. The bailiff tried to move things along by barking, "Show the judge
your stuff!" which should have been a simple procedure, but it wasn't
because it took hours for some men to undo their corsets and brassieres and
Victoria's Secret panties, and just as long for women to shed their muscle
shirts, cotton briefs, and baseball caps. To facilitate an orderly process,
another constitutional amendment had to be passed banning clothes and haircuts
that made men look like women and women look like men, and that still left the prickly
problem of gender-confused people such as priests and Republicans.
Then there was the question
of civil disobedience, which caused many men and women who'd never thought of
it before to cross-dress on purpose. After the million-men-in-skirts and
million-women in overalls march on Washington, the whole institution of
marriage was in danger of toppling even more than it had in calmer days when
the divorce rate was only 50 percent. Indeed, many argued that the amendment
was going to finish marriage once and for all, because the only hope marriage
had BEFORE the amendment was the hope that gay marriages might be more stable
than straight ones.
There were others, of
course, who wanted to refine the amendment according to stricter biblical law,
such as "marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin.
If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed." (Deuteronomy
22:13-21). Such refinement would have the added advantage of thinning the
marrying herd, but it presented, once more, the difficult problem of proving
virginity, which would tie the courts even longer.
And others yet, proposed
that just declaring one's sex should be enough, the way it was back in John
Wayne's days when a man was a man and a horse was a horse, and women weren't
much, which is when there rose in Hollywood an actor named Ronald Reagan who
started the moral revolution. In those days, there were already many men with
long women's hair and women with short men's hair, and Reagan's morals wouldn't
stand for it. It took a while, but at long last a man named Bush was found to
bring the revolution to this point. The rest is history, not
"herstory," mind you, though laughter can be heard more than faintly
in the land.
Never mind though, the
scoffers must be the pre-biblical Greek gods who changed sexes and species all
the time. Real men don't laugh and real women don't sweat.
Andrei Codrescu's novel, "Wakefield" has just been published by
Algonquin Books.