Daniel Henninger from the WSJ recently made the bizarre claim on TV that gay marriage is a slippery slope to perversions like the rural Indian practice of symbolically marrying animals. It’s at 1:41 in the clip:

A woman in India last week married a snake. I would like to ask the proponents of gay marriage, which, after all, violates traditions going back through all of human history, to now absolutely, positively guarantee that the next movement will not be allowing people to marry their pet, horse, dog or cat. And you know what, given the anything-goes culture we live in, I don’t think they can deliver this guarantee.

Let’s unpack this noxious rhetoric: the anti-gay marriage position is that gay marriage is as unnatural as bestiality, and gay people aren’t quite human. Similarly, surely Indian symbolic weddings must be consummated. Therefore, gay marriage = symbolic weddings = bestiality.

I laugh, and not only at the misanthropic evil in this false moral equivalence. I laugh, Señor Henninger, because many Indian marriages are both symbolic and sexless

Stephen Colbert further explains the ‘logic’ behind Henninger’s jawing:

If a woman in India marries a snake, gay people in America should have to justify it.

Colbert, never content to leave something bizarre without making it bizarr-er, explains how to sex a snake and throws in a few phalloherpetological double entendres:

They can unhinge their jaws… Soon, she’ll be wrapped around your healing staff like a caduceus.

Now there’s a masthead I could get behind. The WSJ, however, could do with dropping Daniel Henninger.