Protect marriage?

Let me get this straight. The reason we need a constitutional amendment that outlaws gay marriage and civil unions is because marriage between a man and a woman needs to be protected. That’s what Eric Miller, a man who comes across as a distinctly Hoosier mix of insurance salesman and rock star, told a crowd of cheering people in the Statehouse rotunda last week. Miller was joined by Steve Carter, this state’s attorney general. Marriage, Carter asserted, is the foundation of our society.

Steve, Eric, let me tell you a little bit of what I’ve learned about marriage in the years I’ve lived in Indiana.

I moved here from Northern California in 1980. I was offered a job, a good job, with the public library in Michigan City. I didn’t feel like I could afford to turn it down. There was a problem, though. I was married and my wife was less than thrilled by the prospect of pulling up stakes and migrating to Indiana.

It was a hard decision, involving a lot of stressful back-and-forth. In the end, my wife put me on an airplane and sent me off into a January night. We agreed that she would stay behind, take care of unfinished business and join me in the spring.

It seemed like a reasonable plan at the time. But it didn’t work out. Although my job was great for me, my wife was never able to find traction in Michigan City. She became depressed and eventually split to pursue an opportunity of her own in another part of the world.

I was devastated. She was devastated. We had entered that dim and airless matrimonial circle of hell known as Irreconcilable Differences. In Indiana, this is known as No Fault Divorce.

As it happened, the courthouse in Michigan City was located on the same city block as the public library. One afternoon, I walked out of work early, made three left turns and found myself climbing a flight of well-worn stone steps leading up to a judge’s office. What took place there was so brief, and my emotional state so fraught, that my recollection of what happened next is pretty vague.

I sat at a desk within arm’s reach of a suitably avuncular judge who checked to make sure that my paperwork was in order. This meant seeing that my soon-to-be ex-wife’s signature and my own were on the appropriate lines. As the judge did this, I looked out the window at traffic passing by.

I wondered if maybe the judge would try to talk me out of taking this step. If he would offer words of advice or comfort. He did none of these things. He told me I was all set and then gave me a look that suggested I was taking a long time to leave. He was not unkind, but I got the message.

My marriage was officially over.

Never has the banality of being part of a statistical cohort hit me with such numbing clarity. According to the Census Bureau, 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. What this means in Indiana isn’t clear since this is one of four states (California, Colorado and Louisiana are the others) that don’t keep track — or have lost count — of the number of divorces in their respective jurisdictions. In the year 2000, the total number of divorces in the states that count them was 957,200.

In my case, divorce, though traumatic at the time, is probably one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. I met and married the love of my life a year later. We will celebrate our 22nd anniversary this June. So I am grateful that Indiana made a divorce that did not involve children or a great deal of property simple, clean and quick. If no fault divorce is impersonal, it is also civilized. The state does not attempt to pry or judge a couple’s private pain.

But you’d think that Eric Miller and Steve Carter and all the other people who claim to be defenders of marriage in this state would have a problem with how easy it is to break the ties that bind. You’d think that over the past 20 years or so these guys would have been out pressing the issue about it being easier to get a divorce in Indiana than a driver’s license. This hasn’t happened.

That’s because most Hoosiers — including, I suspect, many of those who were cheering in the rotunda last week — like having a matrimonial escape hatch.
Eric Miller says he doesn’t want Indiana to be like Massachusetts. He says he wants us to beat Mississippi to the punch in adopting a constitutional amendment defending marriage. But Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country — and Mississippi one of the highest.

When politicians twist the language and separate their words from what they really mean, it’s our job to ask why. The talk about defending marriage is really a kind of code designed to dress up legislation intended to build anti-gay bigotry and fear into the state’s Constitution. It’s a way of telling a large group of our fellow citizens to shut up and go away. It will, however, keep them from ever filing for divorce.