Who's making a mockery of marriage?

From the Chicago Tribune blogger Eric Zorn , who is considering a stunt-marriage that is apparently all the news in the Windy City.

Short version of the story: She's from Norway. He's from Chicago. They met face-to-face last Friday for the first time after getting acquainted on Steinberg's Facebook wall and were legally married Thursday in a ceremony in the observation ledge atop the Willis Tower.

To me, the entire event -- it really borders on a stunt -- utterly trivializes the concept of marriage, all the way down to the phony-baloney baptism the woman went through in order to generate the proper paperwork for a nearly instant marriage license.

I agree with Zorn. Marriage to my ideal should be something that develops from a relationship, not that initiates it. That's why so many churches have a couple go through a counseling period in advance. Zorn continues,

But you know what? Our laws allow for hasty stunt-like weddings of men and women with huge crushes on each other; marriages that arguably make a mockery of more traditional marriages. And I'm fine with that. In part because you never know.

And because in a free society, the state should not presume to tell us what we can and cannot do without a compelling interest. Inotherwords, the state can't stop stupid.

But Zorn is not fine with this:

while the law allows virtually any heterosexual couple to get hitched for virtually any fool reason they want, it still forbids loving, committed gay couples from getting married on the grounds that legalizing such unions would threaten the definition and sanctity of traditional marriage.

Indeed. Let's really think of who is damaging marriage. Is it the long standing gay couple, who has stuck together through thick and thin despite every brickbat and insult the conservatives can throw at them? Or the couple who met on Facebook and married on a ledge on a lark?

This kind of thing really exposes the hypocrisy, don't you think?