Opinion: You Call This Marriage?

(Aug. 5) -- The week of the decision on Proposition 8 was also the week of the decision on "The Bachelorette." Ali Fedotowsky said yes to Roberto Martinez, one out of 25 who competed for the chance. Us Weekly had already reported that Roberto moved his insurance business to California, where the two contestants will go to live, apparently in San Diego.

There could be no more perfect metaphor for the state of modern marriage this week.

In the U.S., a couple who barely know each other can marry in a publicly validated media spectacle with a sound track, soft lighting, promotional deals and a cash prize, as long as they are a man and a woman. So far, since the show's inception in 2003, Trista Rehn is the only one of the annual contestants to still be married.

Yet a couple who quietly have been together for 15 years and married twice, in California, each time it became legal, have had to see their relationship invalidated twice by the courts, by people claiming their marriage was threatening traditional marriage.

As ABC looks for a new cast member for the next "Bachelor," it seems to me that if anyone deserves the validation of a show that ends in a wedding, if anyone needs the help of a network, a crew, endorsements and media coverage in their pursuit of a marriage, I nominate these guys. America might learn more about what it takes to be married from them.

It's hard for me to believe that this couple is a bigger threat than "Married by America," the arranged marriage show on Fox, or "Bridezillas," or "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire," or all of the other marriage shows.

If these protectors of marriage are so worried about marriage, why aren't they trying to protect it from this commercialization that cheapens what any of it would even mean?

I commend Arkansas, for example, for trying at least to be sincere: The state introduced Covenant Marriage, as did two other states, a marriage that had stricter provisions regarding grounds for divorce. But it was recently debated in the Arkansas Senate Judiciary Committee, and will perhaps be dropped, as it is regarded as an overwhelming failure. So few couples took advantage of it that it is seen as an empty gesture. The argument that gay marriages threaten straight ones is so far more successful as material for late-night comedians.

It's worth noting that as of this writing, there is not yet a gay Elvis quickie wedding chapel, though I personally would love to marry my boyfriend amid a musical spectacular drawn from, say, "Viva Las Vegas" or "Blue Hawaii."

In the meantime, I'm treated to the spectacle of people who can marry just because they say they want to, on television, anytime, without any real commitment to each other, or even knowing each other, all while being told that my friends, my boyfriend and I, we're the enemy.

I have to wonder, in this economy, if the money spent by Prop 8's proponents wouldn't be better spent in their own communities, feeding the homeless, retraining the long-term jobless, caring for the families of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, caring for the vets returned home. How many other good works could have been done with the money poured into these campaigns?

Alexander Chee, author of the novel "Edinburgh," is a winner of the Asian American Writers' Workshop Lit Award, the Lambda Literary Awards' Editor's Choice Prize and the Michener/Copernicus Prize. Read his blog on Red Room.