Shorter Michael Medved:  Heterosexuals don’t need marriage, therefore homosexuals can’t have it.

No…seriously…that’s his argument in response to Jonathan Rauch’s column in the Wall Street Journal the other day…

It’s not “marriage” – some magical status granted by the government – that serves to make people “healthier, happier and wealthier.” It’s the behavior associated with the marital ideal that brings benefits to couples and their children. That behavior doesn’t require official sanction – any more than official sanction guarantees such behavior.

Medved goes on to make the standard anti-gay case that only opposite sex couples have that magic combination of male and female attributes that make a marriage both stable, and beneficial for children.  But then he goes on to take that to its logical conclusion…

Consider some of the high profile heterosexual couples who have refused to get married. I don’t endorse the politics of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, but given their long-standing and apparently stable commitment, I don’t think their kids have suffered because they never legalized their relationship.

By the same token, I don’t believe that the children of Rosie O’Donnell and her partner will be able to make up for the lack of a father’s love through a change of bureaucratic policy in California or any other state.

Medved’s column is pretty much a simple rehashing of hoary anti-gay and more specifically, anti-male stereotypes.  Gay men can’t control their sex drives because they are men.  Well…yes…Lesbian couples are more stable because they’re both female, but children need both a mother and a father, so their unions are bad for children too.  Never mind that there is not one iota of science behind any of this, let alone tradition.  Consider for a moment, how big the straight jacket is that female sexuality is bound inside in male dominated societies.  It isn’t male sexuality that’s being kept under a tight lid in a culture where boys can sew their wild oats, but girls are sluts if they do the same.  Never mind all that.  Just look at where this delivers Medved.  He is now arguing, in all seriousness, that it is heterosexuality, not marriage, that provides for both stability and a better environment for children.  Heterosexuals are actually so good at it, that marriage is completely unnecessary for them.  This is seriously his argument.

We have been told, over and over again, that allowing homosexual couples to marry will make marriage itself worthless.  And now along comes Michael Medved to argue that it is in fact heterosexuality, by its very nature, that renders marriage worthless.  Sweet.  Can we stop blaming gay people for the horrible state of marriage in this country now?  Please?