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Image Credit: Screen Shot from Pandora

While listening to Pandora the other day, an advertisement interrupted my music.  This advertisement told me that my life would be happier and more successful if I commit myself to a monogamous relationship.  The advertiser was a website called twoofus.org which is sponsored by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and provides resources for individuals and for Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) grantees.  After a little digging around, I found that the Healthy Marriage Initiative was created in 1996 with the injunction to preserve the institution of marriage because “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.”  Hearing this advertisment led me to consider how the traditionally conservative pro-marriage position becomes increasingly complicated, on both the left and the right, in the context of same-sex marriage debates.  Would the creators of this ad feel they had succeeded if I was now persuaded to marry my same-sex partner?  Does pro-marriage mean the same thing that it did to the creator's of the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 1996?

Image Credit: Screen Shot Together in Texas

Twogether in Texas, a local HMI campaign, has billboards all over Austin with hugely inflated intimate portraits of couples.  According to Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News, Twogether in Texas offers marriage workshops that are not exclusively same-sex.  Although Texas has not legalized gay marriage, “non-traditional couples” can participate in these workshops that cover relationship issues such as fidelity, money management and communication.  In such cases, is the pro-marriage movement symbiotic with the same-sex marriage movement?  Recently, a same-sex couple, legally married in Massachusetts, filed for divorce in Dallas, further challenging the rhetorical constraints of pro-marriage positions.  

Image Credit: YouTube

H/T Huffington Post

In a spoof of California’s Proposition 8, the website rescuemarriage.org presents a fake PSA in favor of a fictitious bill called the California Marriage Protection Act.  This PSA uses almost identical language as those opposed to gay marriage to argue that divorce is “unnatural like polyester, glasses and twinkies.”  This parody addresses the complications of pro-marriage arguments in the context of same-sex marriage debates.  On the website this is even more explicit in the article “The Gay Divorcees” in which the author, John Marcotte, goes to torturous lengths to explain why a legally married same-sex couple should not be allowed a divorce because it would be a violation of traditional religious values.