The Backbencher

My Devalued Marriage

I recently kissed my wife good-bye at the airport and took off for California, where, just days before, a federal district court had declared a ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional.

Many of those who support the ban on gay marriage argue that marriage between a man and a woman will be devalued if same-sex couples are allowed to marry. "Huh?" you may be thinking. "How could that possibly be the case?" 

I know, it sounds absurd. But amazingly enough, though it defies logic, I actually noticed the effect as soon as my plane crossed into California airspace. It was weird, but I could actually feel my marriage devaluing.

It doesn't seem like all that long ago that I married my wife Kit in Santa Monica, Calif. We had a caterer, a florist, a bunch of guests, a cake – all that stuff. Kit got her hair done and wore a special dress for the occasion. I wore a tux. At the time it seemed extremely special. But being back in California after Judge Walker's ruling, it all felt so ho-hum, so devalued. Riding the BART train from the airport, I found myself wondering if it would have helped if we had hired a live band for the reception. It was hard to know.

That night I actually had trouble sleeping because my wedding ring felt uncomfortable and foreign on my hand.

Here's the really weird thing – while I was experiencing all this marriage devalument, I wasn't even thinking about the court case! It didn't hit me until I was flipping around through the cable news channels. That’s when I figured it out: It was the Equal Protection Clause! That was why my marriage felt so dull and generally unspecial.

But how could this happen? How could two dudes (or dudettes) getting married to each other possibly affect my marriage?

Well, I was fortunate enough to see a person interviewed on one of the cable shows who explained it. This guy put it in language that I, as a law professor, could understand. He pointed out that counterfeit currency devalues regular currency. (I had to admit that was true.) So, he reasoned, gay marriage, as a kind of counterfeit marriage, devalues everybody's regular marriages.

The force of this argument is really undeniable. Tried though I have, I can not find even the tiniest hole in this guy’s analysis. In fact, the more deeply you think about what he was saying, the more sense it makes. It's really one of the smartest things I've ever heard anyone say. It shows an uncommonly strong grasp of economics, sociology, and some very basic rules of logical thinking. Wow.

Anyway, it got me to figuring, we should not only amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage, we should also take affirmative steps to strengthen the institution of traditional marriage.

Mmmmm, gold.
(Images courtesy U.S. Mint.)

U.S. currency was strongest back in the 1960s when we were still on the gold standard. Ergo, we should put marriage on a gold standard. Think about it: If every married heterosexual could, at any time, freely convert his or her spouse into a specified quantity of gold bullion, then every person who is married would value their marriage more. Divorce rates would plummet. That's just logic.

A lot of the same conservative talk show hosts who are opposed to same-sex marriage are also enthusiastic supporters of returning America to the gold standard. That’s why it’s such a public service for radio talk show hosts to tell us about important gold investment opportunities. It is my hope that thought leaders like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity will realize the synergy here and support the adoption of a marital gold standard.

My own personal story has a happy ending. I got through the whole trip without trying to hook up with any of the women around me. Now, that wasn't because my marriage felt like it was worth anything at the time. It's undoubtedly because I was attending a conference of law professors. That's its own libido kill. 

Most importantly, now that I am safe and sound back home – outside of the jurisdiction of California – my marriage once again feels like it is valuable. (Granted, not as valuable as it would be if I could take Kit down to a federal reserve bank and turn her in for gold, but, you know, still pretty valuable.)

Spree-fueled Spree Spree Leaves Dad Tasteless

Menards home improvement store
(Photo by Huw Williams.)

My wife and kids are away. I've been staying busy and eating right. At Menards, I bought a movie-theater-sized box of Spree – it was only $1. I was excited about this, because previously, I'd only seen Spree come in comparatively small rolls.

Last night, watching television, I consumed the whole box - or at least everything that was in it save the few Spree I found on the floor this morning that must have missed my mouth.

Now I know: Spree should not be eaten in such a large quantity in such a small amount of time. 

This morning, I woke up with much of my tongue apparently destroyed. I grabbed a Diet Coke only to discover, to my disgust, that it tasted like a diet beverage – you know, one from back in the 1970s, before the advent of modern scientific food additives. I can only conclude that all of my tonguebuds in charge of tasting leading-edge artificial sweeteners have now been wiped out. 

I don't know how long it will be before I am able to properly perceive processed foods. It may be a while. Meanwhile, all I can feel over vast areas of my tongue is a slight tinkling pain sensation.

Clearly, while my family is away, I need to do a better job shopping for food at Menards.

The Original Taste of Breakfast in Japan

Konichi-wa! I am writing to you from Sapporo, Japan. And I am a bit dizzy because I haven’t had much to eat.

Now, I don’t care how much you say you love Japanese food. It’s a daunting prospect when you wake up jet-lagged, having survived 30 hours of travel from Grand Forks, North Dakota, and it’s time for breakfast.

Just think for a second about everything you know of Japanese food, and now think about breakfast. Kind of confusing, isn’t it? And besides, I never said I was crazy about Japanese food. I’ve certainly enjoyed many things I’ve eaten in Japanese restaurants, but, to be honest, I’ve got a palate slightly more adventurous than that of my three-year-old son, Joe. And he’s never tried a strawberry.

So I wandered out of my hotel, found a small convenience store, and walked the aisles. The only food product I was able to conclusively identify was a bag of dried octopus. Believe me, even if you’ve never seen dried octopus packaged like beef jerky, it’s the kind of thing where, you know it when you see it. Rows of suction cups on tentacles is a dead giveaway. Everything else on the shelves was utterly mysterious. Now, at one point, I thought I had identified some pretzels, but the fact that they were hanging on the peg next to the dried octopus made me think that I really had no idea what I was looking at.

I overheard a German couple talking – and I don’t know much German – but I did hear the word “Frühstück” spoken with some degree of distress. “Frühstück” means “breakfast.” And doing that translation in my head is about the highest use to which I have put my two years of college German. (Kids, take Español.)

Finally, in a corner of the store, I ran into an old friend: Tony the Tiger. He was perched, broad-shouldered and smiling, on the label of a box of “Frosties.” The color illustration depicted food that certainly looked like Frosted Flakes. So I decided to give it a go.

But now I faced a new problem: milk. After some searching, I found a refrigerated carton bearing a picture of cows in a pasture. Where I come from, that is a clear indication of something that is dairy-themed. And while almost all of the labeling was in Japanese, it did say, in English, in small little letters:

The original taste of milk.

Close enough. I snagged a carton and headed for the checkout.

I’ll note that one thing many travelers struggle with is understanding the value of foreign currency. The exchange rate in Japan is currently one yen to 0.009316 U.S. dollars. With ratios like this, it’s impossible to calculate the exact cost of items on the fly. So you have to make do with estimating. For me, the easiest, if not most accurate method of estimating, is to assume that one yen equals one dollar. The resulting figures make it seem like prices in Japan are astronomically high, but it also makes me feel insanely rich.

Walking out of the store I thought to myself: Did I just drop 475 big ones on a box of Frosted Flakes? Oh yeah, I did!

Back in my hotel room, I selected a small cup intended to hold afternoon tea, and poured in some Frosties. Then I opened the carton and sniffed the white liquid inside. It smelled like seafood.

Okay, I freaked out for a second. But then I remembered that the Japanese are passionately careful in their preparation and handling of seafood. So I took the fishy smell as an indicator of high quality, and I filled up the bowl.

Hmmm. I needed a spoon. The closest I could come on a moment's notice was the complimentary toothbrush the hotel was kind enough to provide me with. Not only did I get a belly full of delicious cereal, but my teeth felt refreshingly clean afterward.

And to think my mom said frosted breakfast cereals would give me cavities!

Avoiding the Tragedy of Low Prices on Beer

One of the great benefits of living in a federal system with 50 sovereign states is that, compared to a normal country, we're 50 times as likely to create really silly laws.

I recently captured these photos of a Marathon service station in west central Ohio selling “beer and wine at state minimum prices.”

Now I’m sorry, but that is just funny. Of all the evils to protect people from, the Ohio legislature, in their infinite wisdom, has seen fit to protect the citizens of the Buckeye State from getting too much of a bargain on beer.

God forbid. Maybe they should outlaw rainbows and cute, fuzzy bunnies while they're at it.

Let me make a clarifying observation: The Ohio legislature is not protecting people from cheap beer. (Natural Light, for instance, is still legal.) They are protecting people from paying cheap prices for beer.

You can see exactly how this plays out in the next two pictures. The minimum prices are different for different beers. A “fancy” beer, Miller Genuine Draft, has a minimum price of $5.19 for a six-pack of bottles. The state allows a longneck six-pack of Busch, however, to be sold for $4.19.

That’s right, the state of Ohio, in its infinite wisdom, forces people to pay more for MGD than for Busch. I’d love to have been there during the committee hearings.

“Esteemed members of the legislature, please put down your tasters. All in favor of making Ohioans pay a buck less for Busch, please signify by stumbling over a lobbyist.”

I’d have taken more photos, but I was stopped by the store clerk. She said the owner of the store, watching on closed-circuit television, was upset. Why? He was, she said – and this is best part – worried that I might be from a competitor store. Huh? What’s a competitor going to do with that information? Undercut his prices??

The law, Ohio Administrative Code 4301:1-1-72, that dictates minimum prices on beer has a preamble explaining its purpose. One aim is to prevent sales that would “improperly stimulate purchase and consumption” of beer.

Oh, okay. That makes sense. So if a “good” beer, like Budweiser Select, were sold for $3.49 per six-pack of 16-ounce cans, then people would go crazy and drink too much. But it’s okay to charge that for Milwaukee’s Best Ice, since, presumably, the taste of “the Beast” serves as its own limit on consumption.

Another purpose of the law is to “eliminate discriminatory sales practices that threaten the survival of wholesale distributors”. That’s a good point. As we all know, a lack of state-minimum prices on beer has led to the tragic loss of beer distribution in most of the rest of the United States.

Now, some of you may think that the real purpose of the law is to eliminate competition on the basis of price. Not so. The law says that part of its purpose is to “preserve orderly competition”.

If we could only put the high-minded geniuses of the Ohio legislature in charge of college sports, we might get more orderly competition in football – for instance, a rule that mandates all teams named “Ohio State Buckeyes” start national championship games with an automatic extra 30 points. That way we could prevent “disorderly” results such as Ohio State losing in back-to-back years.