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209 The great marriage boom of ’84 began shortly after Congress passed the historic National Family Security Act. Though most of its provisions merely took care of old, long overdue business—abolishing divorce, enabling local communities to prosecute single people as vagrants, requiring applicants for civil service jobs to sign a monogamy oath, making the interstate sale of quiche a federal offense, and so on—two revolutionary clauses cleared the way toward making a reality of what had until then been an impossible dream: universal marriage. The child purity provision, popularly known as the Down-There Amendment, prevents premarital sex by allowing parents to marry a child to a suitable mate as soon as he or she shows signs of prurient interests—“After all, it’s better to marry than to burn,” as President Ray Gun so eloquently observed. (An amendment that would have included the unborn in this provision was defeated on the grounds that it cast aspersions on fetal innocence.) Another landmark is the act’s legalization of homosexual marriage. This was the most controversial aspect of the bill, splitting the pro-family movement into two camps—the purists, who insisted that homosexuality was a sin, period, and the pragmatists , who pointed out that denying homosexuals the sacrament of marriage discouraged their impulses toward decent respectability, kept dens of iniquity like Greenwich Village in business, and played into the hands of feminists who claimed that women didn’t really want to get married anyway. In the end a compromise was reached: homosexuals who swore not to have sex would be permitted to marry, and those who declined to take advantage of this privilege would be deported to Saudi Arabia. The week after President Gun signed the bill into law, we interviewed a number of the happy couples who had been standing on line at City Hall for up to The Last Unmarried Person in America 210 THE EIGHTIES three days waiting to apply for marriage licenses. The heterosexuals all insisted the Family Security Act had nothing to do with their decision to tie the knot. “It was a totally spontaneous thing,” said one radiant young woman. “We were ready to make a commitment.” “My landlord was going to double my rent,” her radiant young fiance explained . “He feels, and I can’t say I really blame him, that single men attract quiche-eaters to the area. It got me thinking, and I realized that I really wanted to settle down.” “It was so cute the way he proposed,” the young woman broke in. “He came over one afternoon while I was sewing scarlet S’s on my clothes—it was the day before the deadline, and I’d been procrastinating, as usual. He kissed me and said, ‘Why spend your time doing that, when you could be sewing on my buttons instead?’” We talked next to a pair of radiant young lesbians who proclaimed this the happiest day of their lives. To our delicate inquiry as to whether it would bother them not to have sex, one of the women replied coldly, “That is a bigoted, heterosexist question. Why do straight people always assume we’re dying for sex? We think sex is dirty just like you do.” “We’re getting married for love,” her fiancee declared, “and for children.” “Do you plan to adopt,” we asked, “or to be artificially inseminated?” “Don’t be ridiculous! We’re going to have our own. The idea that women need men to have babies is patriarchal propaganda. Do you still believe that fairytale about God being Jesus’s father?” On June 30, after a month in which clergymen and government officials worked around the clock to meet the demand for weddings, riots erupted in two cities where laboratory equipment needed for blood tests broke down from overuse, and the last shipment of degenerate sex fiends was dispatched to the Middle East, the president announced proudly that the goal for which all Americans were praying had been achieved: everyone in the 50 states and the District of Columbia was married. The next day our newspaper received an indignant phone call. “Tuesday here,” said a voice that sounded like a cross between a purr and a bark. “I’m calling you guys because you have a reputation for being openminded . Didn’t your editor come out for allowing divorce to save the lives of the children?” “Not divorce,” we said. “Just separation.” “Okay. But you agree that what’s going...

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