Someone please think of the adulterers and abusers!

Bill Berowitz has an interesting article at Working for Change about the push to get more people to sign up for the Covenant Marriage in Arkansas. For those who don't know, covenant marriages are super-special marriages that are extra-hard to get out of. You undertake them to show that you are more special than other married couples and your reward is that if you want out, even if your spouse is beating you or cheating on you, you have to go through a counseling period and a cooling off period.

Basically, the covenant marriages are the Wife Beater Protection Act. The Christian right loves covenant marriages. I'm guessing the reason is that wives are supposed to submit graciously to their husbands, and one can't really be angry if the husbands occasionally have to resort to physical methods to remind their wives of this fact.

Apparently, not that many couples were that enthused about getting into marriages they can't get out of, even if there's abuse. (Well, get out of via divorce. The proliferation of guns in this part of the country makes another method of finding yourself suddenly single rather tempting, I'm sure.) According to this article, a mere 400 couples have gotten the Super Special Covenant Marriage since 2001, compared to 40,000 a year since then. One does wonder how many of these hard-to-leave marriages had the enthusiasm of both spouses going in. If I were a wife-beater, I myself would put some effort into persuading my bride that it's her Christian duty to enter the marriage titled No Exit. Especially if I wanted her to just flee the state, leaving my children behind with me out of desperation if it ever got to that point. Same story if I had a roving eye--I wouldn't want my spouse to just stomp out the second I was caught in bed with someone else.

Gov. Huckabee of Arkansas wants to have a mass wedding of 1,000 couples where at least one spouse wants to make it very, very difficult for the other to leave the marriage for whatever reason on Valentine's Day. I'm guessing it's a big fat Fuck You to the thousands of gay and lesbian couples who married on Valentine's Day this past year. I'm afraid that Gov. Huckabee is going to be sorely disappointed in the different qualities to the event. A weak offering of a couple hundred couples with cowed wives a dominant faction just won't compete well with the stream of joyous same sex couples that poured our of City Hall in San Francisco recently. A display of servitude to an oppressive institution just doesn't have that same Valentine's Day feel that a display of joyous love does.