Personalize Your Platitudes

These Family Blah Blah groups are really something. You ought to see the way Focus on the Family has set up this system so you -- yes, you! -- can send a unique, one-of-a-kind letter to the editor of your favorite newspaper, telling them, in your own words, exactly why the US Constitution needs an amendment saying who American citizens can marry.

You click through and put together your very own personalized letter. For instance, here are your options for the opening:

Paragraph 1:

Option 1: For centuries now, in every civilized culture, marriage as the union of one man and one woman has been the building block of society. But it may not be true in America for long -- unless Congress approves the Marriage Protection Amendment.

Option 2: The U.S. Senate is poised to vote on the Marriage Protection Amendment, and the stakes couldn't be higher for our country and its future generations.

Option 3: Liberals argue that the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would define marriage solely as the union of one man and one woman, would write discrimination into the U.S. Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Option 4: Marriage has been under attack ever since no-fault divorce laws made it easier for us to discard our husbands and wives. Now, the attack is coming from those who want to open up marriage to same-sex couples -- and only the Marriage Protection Amendment can stop them.

Option 5: Never mind that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose gay marriage. It's perilously close to becoming the law of the land -- unless citizens like us step up and demand our federal lawmakers pass the Marriage Protection Amendment.

See? All you have to do is click a few links to compose a letter, and it will look like you wrote it yourself. They'll even email it for you from their web site.

You don't have to care enough to write a real letter, you just have to click the buttons on your mouse and it's done.

Listen to these exciting second paragraph options:

Paragraph 2:

Option 1: Yelling "discrimination" is just one strategy the left has used to defeat this amendment. They also have argued that gay marriage is a civil rights issue akin to the African-American struggle for equality. No less a civil rights icon than Jesse Jackson has denounced that claim, noting that "gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution."

Option 2: Amendment opponents have asked, "How does one couple's gay marriage threaten anyone's heterosexual marriage?" This question misses the point: The goal of gay activists isn't the individual relationship of any two people; it is the revision of national policy to say that gender, especially in child-rearing, is inconsequential.

Option 3: Amendment supporters have been disparaged as "bigots." How can that be, when the language being proposed is similar to the language of the Defense of Marriage Act, passed by 427 members of Congress? Are they -- and former President Clinton, who signed the bill into law -- bigots, too?

Option 4: It's important to note that those who support the amendment aren't trying to deprive homosexuals of any of the legal protections they currently enjoy; gay marriage has never been a constitutional right in America. It is not "discriminatory" to want the law to continue to provide for reasonable limitations on who can marry.

Option 5: Backing the amendment is not about bigotry. Marriage is open to any two individuals who meet certain criteria regarding age and blood relationship, and who are of the opposite sex. Gay activists seek not to end discrimination, but rather to completely redefine -- and thus undermine -- the foundational institution of marriage.

... and so on. There are four paragraphs, each one with five options, for a total of 625 possible uniquely different letters.

And hey, speaking of letters to the editor, did you see the Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum's big letter-writing campaign in the Gazette? Michelle Turner, Ruth Jacobs, Ben Patton -- all three solid core members of the CRC -- and another person all sent letters to the editor, the usual bull-oney, I'm not going to bother linking to it or discussing it.

Does this mean that the CRC now has as many as four active members? (I don't know who this fourth person is, someone named "Lynne Brite." I'll give CRC the benefit of the doubt, and pretend she's one of them.) Obviously they have not yet learned to automate the letter-writing process.