Now that I think about it, I do feel my marriage is under attack, not by gays but by Republicans.
I hate George Bush, and while my husband of twenty-two and a half years doesn't like him, he doesn't hate him with the passion that I hate George. My husband doesn't feel as passionate about any political thing as I do.
So my stinking, rotten, putrid, ravenous anger over George is getting old to my husband. He doesn't think we can really change anything, and he's tired of hearing me rant about George, this thing we can not change.
So George Bush is threatening my marriage.
I have to say that George's stupid, irresponsible, expensive, horribly depressing war in Iraq is also threatening my marriage.
It's hard for me to live day after day and not be pissed off about this. How stupid it was. How stupid we were as a country to fall for it. How obnoxious George is. His smirk. His flight suit and his stupid banner, Mission Accomplished.
Better for me to think of these things than all the people we've killed. The children bleeding and screaming and missing body parts. The tiny graves.
It's hard not to be depressed when I think of these things, and depression -- as anyone who's ever experienced it will tell you -- definitely threatens a marriage.
I have to believe that George Bush's sickeningly repressive, hateful-to-the-middle-class tax cuts are threatening my marriage. We're definitely middle class, don't have a lot of debt, but sure don't have much to fall back on, either. And it's hard to be happy in a marriage when you're worried about your bills.
Wages are stagnant, have been for years. The national debt is like a really bad joke, and someone will have to pay. I don't think our financial situation is going to get any better while any Republican is in office, and that's depressing on top of worrisome, so there's a two-way threat to my marriage.
Health care costs are definitely threatening my marriage. My husband has group, family coverage, but it was a whopping $6,000 a year last year, and that doesn't account for what it didn't cover and we paid out of pocket. The amount only rises. So health care costs aren't doing my marriage any good, either.
I ranted and raved about George and the hurricane, too, and it was as hard to watch the people dying there as it is to think of those people in Iraq we're killing. So Hurricane Katrina is threatening my marriage.
Brown people.... lots of brown people work at my husband's company. It's a lousy company. I wish he didn't work there. They use and abuse people, overwork them and make them crazy and if they complain, they just hire new people. My husband's one of the few people there earning a middle-class wage, while a couple of guys who own it are getting rich because they can hire brown people who sneaked across the border and are willing to do just about anything to earn money to send back to their families in those countries beneath us.
So while those couple of guys who own the place get rich exploiting the brown people and my husband works a regular week of 11-hour days, five days a week plus an 8-hour day on Saturday, and we have a president who preaches hate toward the brown people... well, that just pisses me off, too. Those brownpeople are good enough to mow our lawns, build our houses, pick our fruit and clean our houses, but not good enought to be citizens?
Plus everybody's nervous over the hatred spewing out of the Repugs about brown people right now. All the poor, exploited brown people are nervous and pissed off. Things aren't going so well at the plant (which makes me happy, because the owners deserve shit) but makes my husband's job harder, and then when they arrest a few brown people down the road from the plant, being exploited by some other obnoxious white person, the work force at my husband's company doesn't show up for a few days out of fear and that makes everything harder, too.
I'm trying my best to talk my husband into quitting and finding anything else he can do and he wants out, but it's not easy being his age to find even a blatantly middle-class job, and that's threatening my marriage.
My kids' are nearing college age, and thanks to all the Repugs in our state, college costs have soared. A democrat put in a great tuition-free program 10 years ago. Any in state kid could go tuition free at its inception. Great program. I thought my kids would go nearly for free, too, but then we elected Republicans as governor and they fucked up the program but good. The original state grant money's still there, but the Repugs refused to fund the colleges (they control the budget) so the colleges raised tuition accordingly and now we still get the state grand, but it doesn't nearly cover the tuition anymore. The Repugs have effectively made the Democratic tuition grant program null and void, those scum-suckers.
And that pisses me off and makes me rant and adds to the financial pressures, and all of that is threatening my marriage.
All that shit the Repugs pull about birth control would be pissing me off mightily, but it's pretty far down on my list since my husband's had a vasectomy and I have so many other things to be pissed off about. I feel bad about not feeling worse about the whole birth control shit, but I just can't get everything on my list to be pissed off about. The list is too long.
So far, I haven't had one gay person do anything to me or my marriage. I really don't think any of them care about my marriage, except that they'd like to have one, too, and I just don't see how that threatens mine.
It's not like my marriage is something they can take away from me and use it themselves. Marriages are non-transferrable, after all.
So... yes, my marriage is threatened, but mostly by George Bush & Co.