There is just no part of this that something isn't wrong with.

Roberta X linked to this strange pledge Michele Bachman has apparently signed.  I ignored it coming from some of my liberal Facebook friends, given that 99% of what they link to is bunk.  This is that one percent; what Erik would refer to as a blind squirrel finding a nut.

I won't link to the pledge itself, since it's a PDF  & these things are screwy on Erik's Mac, but she has the link, so go there to look at it.

And, well, it's at least as bad as she says; I think she might be lowballing it a bit.  They manage to sing the praises of the slave era as relates to black families, and blame gays for all that is wrong with hetero marriage and a whole bunch of other things.  I think this is my favorite part, though:

Social protections, especially for women and children, have been evaporating as we have collectively "debased the currency" of marriage.  This debasement continues as a function of adultery; "quickie divorce;" physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-commital co-habitation; pervasive infidelity and "unwed cheating" among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender, and hair color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.

LOLwhut?  I am fairly certain that paragraph/sentence is meaningless, but it manages to insult me and my intelligence several times.

I am forced to seize on their condemnation of "quickie divorce"...Texas has a pretty fast/simple divorce process--60 days' separation, and if you agree, you're done.  (There's also a 30 or 60 day moratorium on remarriage post-divorce; I don't remember which anymore.)  If you've had nothing better to do since 2007 than read my blog, you know full well the hell I went through with my quickie divorce.  You also know that I really wasn't able to start healing until it was done.  And that's the trouble with instituting extended 'second chance' or 'cooling off' periods for those seeking 'quickie divorce'".  No one wakes up in a happy marriage one morning and decides to dissolve it by next Tuesday.  Sometimes it's something acute, like discovery of an affair.  Sometimes it's the culmination of the chronic illness of having never been happy.  But it's never done lightly, so the idea of stretching out the divorce process truly doesn't help anyone.  It will not result in fewer divorces; it will result in more default infidelity and children born in a marriage other than their parents' as people insist on moving on with their lives before the paperwork is completed.  At best, you would have people like me, who refuse on principle to date before the divorce was finalized, who would be kept in limbo for no good reason.

Although I do realize the difficulties encountered by children from broken families, 'cause...duh.  But you know what?  There is one hell of a lot more to life than economics, and my daughters would have been harmed much, much more long-term by the continuation of my first marriage than they will be now.  Because my ex-husband never respected me, never took my side on anything, and in general treated me with everything from simple disdain to outright dismissal, with occasional forays into sexual and emotional abuse.

But hey, it was straight marriage, so that makes it okay, huh?