The sacred and the pop star.

Let's call it the Britney standard. According to her extremely hot ex-husband, Jason Alexander (no, not the one who played George Costanza), young megastar Britney Spears decided to get married early in the morning in Las Vegas on not much more than a whim. Alexander told Access Hollywood, "It was just crazy, man. And we were just looking at each other and said, 'Let's do something wild, crazy. Let's go get married, just for the hell of it.'" It lasted a couple of days and was annulled for the following legal reasons: Spears "lacked understanding of her actions to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to the marriage," and "plaintiff and defendant did not know each other's likes and dislikes, each other's desires to have or not have children, and each other's desires as to state of residency." Apart from that, they were behaving like adults.

How did the general culture react? Celebrity overdrive, of course--stories in all the usual places, even The New York Times. The stunt is unlikely to hurt Spears or her former hunka-husband. The latter's father reacted by saying that if he'd been given a similar chance with Jennifer Lopez, he'd have done the same thing.

One small question. According to the president of the United States, civil marriage is a "sacred" thing, something so sacred that it might be necessary, in his view, to amend the very Constitution to bar gay couples from marrying. Gay couples, you see, would defile the sanctity of the civil compact of marriage. But Britney? No problem. The boob-tubed blondshell was just exercising her constitutional rights. Her self-admitted "joke" gone too far is still "sacred." And she enjoyed for around 48 hours more rights and benefits than gay couples have ever enjoyed in this country since its inception,

Angry yet? You should be. Go scour the pages of the conservative "pro-marriage" press and you will find nary a word condemning Spears. Check out the "pro-marriage" Web sites of the Family Research Council or the Alliance for Marriage or any other religious right organization and you will find plenty of fulmination against the social catastrophe looming if we allow gay couples to marry. But Britney? Radio silence.

It's a useful test, isn't it? If the anti-gay-marriage forces were really concerned about upholding traditional marriage rather than demonizing and marginalizing gay citizens, they would surely have burst a gasket over Spears's casual, shameless trashing of the sanctity of the restitution. But tackling Spears in public would have made the far right look like scolds or puritans; it would have held straights and gays to the same standard--and that's something the religious right almost never does.

They're not the only ones with double standards. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act while getting adulterous blow jobs. Newt Gingrich was defending civilization against gay marriages while carrying on an adulterous affair. But hey, they're straight! They get to pick what's sacred and what isn't.

Or look at the Fox network, the people who gave you Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?--a reality show that reduced "sacred" marriage to a mercenary con-trick. Their latest gambit for ratings is My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance, a show in which a woman agrees to marry an obese oaf for money. The show is produced by News Corp., which also owns the neoconservative Weekly Standard, a magazine that has campaigned against any civil rights for homosexuals whatsoever. Cognitive dissonance? Nah.

Here's a deal for straight conservative America. You're perfectly entitled to rhapsodize about traditional marriage. If that's your" reason for barring gays from marriage, fine. But until you criticize straight trashing of traditional marriage, until you support a constitutional amendment braining or restricting straight divorce, until you show even a scintilla of moral consistency, no one need take you seriously. You're not pro-marriage. You're antigay. And the evidence of your prejudice mounts daily.