ATLANTA - Trista and Ryan are getting married.
If you don't know who they are, you're somehow immune to the contagion of popular culture. Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter, the fiancM-i she chose in a televised competition, are all over the airwaves as ABC relentlessly promotes their romance-for-ratings. The network has inflated the nuptial into a three-part miniseries, which culminates Wednesday with the vows.
This marriage has about as much chance of survival as the first of these tasteless spectacles, the union of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire groom Rick Rockwell and his bride, Darva Conger. It collapsed within days.
Many conservatives have denounced the prospect of gay marriage because, they say, it would make a mockery of traditional marriage. Nonsense. If the institution has been mocked, the blame should be laid firmly at the feet of heterosexuals, including conservative stalwarts such as Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox network pioneered these freak shows three years ago with the Rockwell-Conger stunt.
Since then, I've waited to hear conservative moralizers condemn the Rockwell-Conger clones as loudly as they do the prospect of gay marriage. I've listened for the harrumphs of William J. Bennett and the harangues of James C. Dobson.
So far, however, there has been little in the way of public opprobrium from the crowd that claims to police "family values." Apparently, those upright moralizers are less threatened by a publicity stunt that flouts the principles marriage is supposed to embody - a commitment of love and loyalty based on mutual respect and shared values - than they are by the idea of genuine love and commitment between two members of the same sex.
How can I be so sure Trista and Ryan don't share such a love? Having never met the (publicity) happy couple, I can't claim to know with absolute certainty. But I have strong doubts about this marriage.
As the star of a reality show called The Bachelorette, Ms. Rehn chose her husband-to-be from a group of strangers, all of whom she got to know in six weeks under the glare of TV cameras. Nothing could be less real, since all the contestants were performing. Indeed, many of the contestants on so-called reality shows are aspiring entertainers who are professionally cast.
