The folks who try to argue that traditional marriage can’t be harmed by the gay rights agenda might want to tell these folks to put a sock in it.

Trying to get a law passed to forcibly annul marriages if the couple does not have children within three years of the wedding is hardly the way to strengthen any marriages. It’s not a particularly wise public policy, either. What if a young married couple strongly wants to have children, but thinks it would be wise to finish school or pay off school loans first?

And, of course, those couples having difficulty conceiving will certainly appreciate the extra psychological pressure of a government-imposed reproduction deadline.

The time frame is nothing if not ungenerous. Folks get two years and a few months to get pregnant, or their marriage is kaput — orders from the state. All you need is for one spouse to get sent overseas with the U.S. military (not necessarily Iraq, either — we have plenty of long overseas deployments to South Korea and elsewhere) and the two year pregnancy window gets cut pretty short.

The minute a liberal sex activist tells you he wants to keep government out of the bedroom, believe the opposite.

Addendum: I’ve had e-mail suggesting (or, at the very least, wondering), if the fact that I objected to this “automatic annulment” idea with examples of how it adversely would affect married couples that do have children means that I don’t disagree with the idea quite so much when it comes to childless married couples. Not so. I object to the automatic annulment idea across the board, in more ways than I had time to post.

I don’t write about the gay marriage issue often, but anyone who is interested in more of my views on the matter might check out a response I wrote to Andrew Sullivan in 2004, when he expressed the opinion that, under the U.S. Constitution, “…under almost any rational understanding of equal protection, civil marriage has to be extended to gay couples.” I think he’s wrong about that.