Gay marriage will not bring the end of civilization, reality television will.

I am so deeply disturbed when politicians running for office fail to read history. In an interview with GQ, Mike Huckabee claims that gay marriage would lead to the demise of civilization. That, any society that has changed the rules of marriage, has not survived.

I don’t think the issue’s about being against gay marriage. It’s about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that’s important. You have to have a basic family structure. There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it’s one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that’s their business. But when you want to redefine what family means or what marriage means, then that’s an issue that should require some serious and significant debate in the public square. And if you look at states that have had it on the ballot—I know in our state it was a 70-percent-against issue. Most states are similar to that.

Supporting traditional marriage is being against gay marriage, doesn’t matter how many ways you spin it. That is transparent. If conservatives want to keep marriage so traditional they should be thinking about reality TV shows that are anything but sacred, or divorce rates, which as Wanda Sykes says is the biggest threat to marriage-not gay marriage.
Also, can I see some examples of when marriage laws were changed, a society or civilization crumbled. Beyond the fact that many, many, many societies have changed marriage laws and traditions, including our own when we overturned anti-miscegenation laws, civilizations have not been destroyed. Devilstower at Kos makes the point that,

The truth is that every society rewrites the rules of marriage and family. That’s what happens to all our social values as they respond to changes in how we live, what we know, and our available resources. Yes, friction occurs when the boundaries of a social convention no longer match those of a society in which it’s embedded, but the societies that survive are exactly those which demonstrate the flexibility to change and adapt.

I agree, but I also take an even more hard-line stance, that as long as marriage is pushed to maintain traditional gender roles, it is under the purview of patriarchy. Not allowing gay marriage is just another way to maintain male gender dominance in heteronormative marriage structures. It is one of the untold stories deeply embedded in the castrated, paranoid imagination of the freeper.
Furthermore, if they actually believe that allowing gay marriage will bring the end of civilization, they are giving a lot of credit to the actual power allowing gay marriage would have. It is going to take a lot more than a mainstream, middle class, gay marriage movement, to dismantle the oppressive state-sanctioned, culturally mandated apparatus, that heternormative marriage is.