Insert Generic "Fox News is Dumb" Headline Here

Fox News is dumb. It's not even news. It's opinion. And not just opinion, loudly shouted opinion. But Fox Loudly Shouted Opinion doesn't have the same ring, so they went with News, which sounds better but is, of course, misleading.

Want some proof? Here's a column by Fox News Anchor John Gibson. The headline?

The Basic Idea of Marriage Is to Raise Kids

Great headline! It includes the word "is," which headlines aren't supposed to do. Oh, yeah, and one other minor note...it makes no sense.

The idea of marriage is to raise kids? Say what? Since when did this become a boldly stated fact? I know quite a number of married couples without kids. My friend and frequent Inertia commentor Jason, for example, is happily married to a lovely woman named Stacy and they don't have any kids. Honestly, they don't even seem to like kids very much. And it's pretty weird for John Gibson to just assume that these people's lives have no validity.

But, of course, his point isn't to pick on couples like Jason and Stacy, who live a lifestyle that would be considered healthy and normal by 99.99999% of the US population. No, he just wants an excuse to bag on gays.

As you might have heard, a judge in San Francisco has ruled that it is unconstitutional for the state of California to ban gay marriage. That means all those same sex couples who were married by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom can go back to thinking they are married.

See what I mean?

"Can go back to thinking they are married." What as ass. What an offensive, obnoxious thing to say, as if John Gibson gets to decide who's married and who isn't. They had a ceremony, they got a certificate from City Hall, they said "till death to us part" and "I do." Guess what, turd? They're married! You can go back to thinking they aren't married, just like you can go on thinking that you're not a complete douchebag, but as Nice Guy Eddie would say, that don't make it fucking so.

Why is it just men and women? Because since history has been recorded, chipped in stone, inked onto papyrus, scribed into great books or printed on your ink jet, the basic idea behind marriage has been to set up a system for the raising of kids.

In addition to not being a newsman, John's also not much of a historian. Go on, ask a historian what the traditional purpose of marriage has always been throughout recorded history. They'll look at you like you don't know what you're talking about. Because it's a silly question. Because people have used the concept of "marriage" for thousands of different reasons throughout recorded history.

In European history, marriage most often relates back to economic matters. Dowries, exchanges of land, centralizations of ownership and power, that's what drives historical marriage in places like France, England and Spain.

And then, of course, there's that whole love thing.

Check out a Shakespeare play. How do all the Comedies end? If you answered "with people getting married," congrats, you're a lot smarter than John Gibson. And here's a follow-up question...do they all end in people having babies? Um, nope! Just marriage. Gee, kind of seems like the concept of marriage related to something other than procreation, huh, John? And it's not like that's an obscure historical example. I know they might not have included all of Shakespeare's Comedies in the Classics Illustrated series, J.G., but you could have picked up some Cliff's Notes.

Gays can't have kids — other than going to the abandoned kids store and getting one or two, or borrowing sperm from someone with more sperm than brains — so by definition they're out of the marriage game.

Gays can too raise children. They can even have children, just not with one another. Many of them do. In fact, there's a good number of gay couples raising the biological child of one of the partners, just like there's a good number of straight couples raising children that aren't biologically related to either partner. As a society, we attempt to restrict the number of gay people who can raise children by making it more difficult for them to marry and/or adopt, but that doesn't mean they are somehow incapable.

And "the abandoned kids store"? Does he think that's funny? The truth is, there are a great number of abandoned children in the United States, and they are no less worthy of the love of a parent or two than anyone else...Goofing on them like this, assuming that it's a nice little joke to make an aside about our horrific foster care and adoption system in our country, just demonstrates this man's immense distaste for hsi fellow human. What a dick.

Also, as Wonkette noted in her piece on this same article, all guys have more sperm than brains. We only have one brain, but we have millions of sperm.

In theory, so would couples who get married in their eighties.

That's not a sentence. But I think he means, "Just as gays can't have children, neither can couples who get married in their eighties."

Chances are good that no kids come out of that holy union. But it is at least theoretically possible. Not so with gays.

Oh, John, John, John...It's not theoretically possible for an 80 year old woman to have a baby. Didn't anyone ever discuss with you how this works? You're a grown man!

So, we have established thus far that Gibson isn't qualified to discuss journalism, history or anatomy. Care to go for four?

Now, gay couples should have certain rights of marriage — inheritance, insurance, visitation — all that lawyerly stuff.

But they should take the advice of a friend of mine who said he'd defend gays against any form of discrimination, but they had to pick a new word — marriage is taken.

Constitutional Law! That makes four!

You see, there's this Supreme Court decision, it's kind of important. It says that we're not allowed to have a system that's "separate but equal." It means you can't have marriage for straights and marriage for gays and say that they're the same, but actually include separate rights. You remember when we told all the black people they had to use the "special" bathrooms and drinking fountains? This ruling is why we're not allowed to do that any more. And it applies to all sorts of things, including marriage.

So, the whole "we should let them be together but not call it marriage" thing was already outlawed...almost forty years ago, jackass!

Honestly, there's a bit more to this article, but I can't even go on right now...It's too much ignorance. I can't take it. I'm going to have to read a chapter of "People's History of the United States" or something just to balance this out.