Via Raw Story…  On the Colbert Report the other day, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger, said, no shit, that same sex marriage would lead to people marrying snakes…

HENNINGER: This is a footnote to our gay marriage discussion: A woman in India last week married a snake. I would like to ask the proponents of gay marriage–which violates, after all, traditions going back through all of human history–to now absolutely, positively guarantee that the next movement is not going to be allowing people to marry their pet horse, dog or cat. And you know What? Given the "anything goes" culture we live in, I don’t think they can deliver that guarantee.

Well you’d think that if people could marry snakes, Henninger would be delighted to know it, since that would mean he’d finally be able to marry an equal.  But…look at this.  This isn’t a babbling street lunatic, it’s the fucking editor of the editorial page of the goddamned Wall Street Journal.  What drooling moron gave that man a job?

Ironically enough (and you need a high tolerance for irony in this struggle),  these are usually the same kook pew bigots who complain that the black civil rights movement has been co-opted by the homos.  Fine.  If that movement is not responsible for ours, then ours is not responsible for whoever comes next.  You judge each movement on the merits of its claims to justice, not on the merits of every possible other case.

By the way…here’s how the story of the woman who married a snake was reported by the AFP (via Yahoo news)… 

Villagers welcomed the wedding in the belief it would bring good fortune and laid on a feast for the big day.

Snakes and particularly the King Cobra are venerated in India as religious symbols worn by Lord Shiva, the god of destruction.

Das, from a lower caste, converted to the animal-loving vegetarian Vaishnav sect whose local elders gave her permission to marry the cobra, the world’s largest venomous snake that can grow up to five metres.

"I am happy," said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.

"Bimbala was ill," Bhoi told local OTV channel. "We had no money to treat her. Then she started offering milk to the snake … she was cured. That made her fall in love."

Das has moved into a hut built close to the ant hill since the wedding.

Earlier this year, a tribal girl was married off to a dog on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar.

If this story proves anything it’s that for sure marriage means different things to different people in different cultures.  Note the association of the snake with their deity.  If you want to talk about traditions going back through all of human history, there aren’t any much older then associating animals with deities and using them in one way or another to express religious veneration. Yes that seems very odd to the modern western sensibility, but we’re not exactly free of all that earth god essentialism ourselves.  Considering that Henninger is probably part of one of the many mainstream American religious sects that practice a symbolic form of ritual cannibalism (this is my body…), I don’t think he should sniff too loudly at the religious practices of others.  And what is this redemption by the blood thing (the blood of the lamb as they like to say), if not an echo to a distant past that was chock full of dead sacrificial animals…and humans?  In my theological moods, I like to think this is why we’re warned against idolatry: by venerating the physical, we loose sight of the spiritual.  But the fact is that we in the west are not so far away from that tribal earth god past as we might like to believe.  A little more respect for other cultures, walking their own walk from the human past into the human future, wouldn’t kill us.

Marriage to animals is not our way in the west.  Marriage as a union of two adult human beings is.  To love honor and cherish.  In sickness and in health.  For richer or for poorer.  ‘Til death do us part.  That is our way.  Same sex marriage changes that not one iota.