Hard to believe, isn’t it? Just one year ago, Word Munger was a tiny babe, almost too fragile to hold in your arms. That’s right, Word Munger sprouted into existence one year ago today. It’s a very merry Word Birthday today, and to celebrate, I’m going to use a tactic mastered by sitcoms the world over: a retrospective episode.

So what wise words did I utter that first day? Be amazed. No, not at the lame-o welcome post, at the comment spam. The next day I wondered whether I should post pictures of my kids online. I concluded that it was probably an irrational fear, but that maybe I shouldn’t be sharing my kids with all the stalkers and riff-raff that would naturally be attracted to my musings about the latest e-book reader. Of course, it didn’t take me long to blow that.

Abortion has been a recurring topic here on Word Munger. A recurring theme of my discussion has been the idea that I wouldn’t make much of a pro-choice advocate.

Another topic I just can’t seem to stop yakking about is e-books. You’d think I could just write a post or two about them and then leave them alone, but somehow, I always come back to the topic. Am I destined to become some sort of e-brarian in a future life? Could there really be that much to say about e-books? Why, if I don’t read a lot of books, am I so obsessed with e-books? Would I suddenly read more if I had a better e-book reader? Stay tuned to Word Munger, because if the past is any indication, you’ll hear a lot more about e-books in the future.

I’ve also written a lot about writing over the past year. A common theme in this topic is my own lack of writing ability. There’s been a bit of self-promotion tossed into the mix, along with a touch of literary posturing.

My travel has been another topic of interest to me. If you weren’t interested, too bad, because that’s what I was writing about.

And what’s with all this writing about technology? If I wasn’t writing about my new computer, I was writing software reviews (this incidentally was the most visited post on Word Munger — ever — thanks to a link from MacBytes). And, of course, the fact that I’m not a designer never stopped me from ranting about design.

I’ve also done my fair share of writing about my neighborhood. It’s … shall we say … suburban. That’s right, folks, my kids are growing up in the kind of place we city kids used to always make fun of. They’re reliant on their parents for every little thing, because even the nearest grocery store is sixteen miles away in a strip mall. Forget about going to the movies on your own, or riding a bus … anywhere. And of course, like any suburbanite, I’m obsessed with my lawn (a man’s gotta have one vice, okay? At least I don’t own an SUV).

Satire has been a feature of Word Munger since before the beginning. That’s right, before there was Word Munger, there was Word Munger, the all-satire, all-the-time predecessor to the Word Munger Blog. I like satire, but eventually it wore on me, and I stopped promising it every Friday. Don’t give up, satire fans, every once in a while I’ll whip up some for you. In the meantime, there’s always Michael Berube.

In these past twelve months, I admit to having done just a bit of writing about Social Security. I even got a comment from the blogosphere’s most famous economist, Brad DeLong.

One topic I never enjoy visiting is my own stupidity. Typically this has to do with my reading an article too fast and then exploding into a rant about what I thought I just read. This post is probably the worst example of it. I’m impressed that Tom Maguire took my idiocy as well as he did.

I have written a few posts about my lack of religious faith. Some are intended to be funny, but others are quite serious. My son Jim, who my wife is attempting to raise as a Presbyterian, read that last one and told me he agreed with it. Uh-oh.

All in all, it’s been a good year. I’ve enjoyed it, so I’ll probably stick around for another one. See you in the blogosphere.

Let me start by saying that I couldn’t care less what gender combinations are involved in domestic unions. I’m with John Scalzi, who points out that the strength of his own marriage has nothing to do with who’s allowed to marry whom in Massachusetts. I agree: it would be better if committed gays had the same marital rights as heterosexual couples. But I don’t think it’s worth losing an election over.

Gay marriage has somehow become a major issue this election cycle, and the Republicans love it. Why? Because they know most Americans are a bunch of bigoted prudes on this issue. It plays right into their hands: they can claim they’re the party of righteous morality.

Meanwhile, John Kerry’s proclamation at the DNC that he opposed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage received thunderous applause, making the Democratic party look like a bunch of AIDS-carrying, bathhouse hanging pedophiles.

Everyone has heard the sob stories about the gay couples who can’t visit each other in the hospital or make funeral arrangements for one another. Yes, we’re all deeply moved. What most of America can’t understand is why this gives men the constitutional right to doll themselves up in wedding dresses and get all huggy-kissy in town halls across the nation. What the Democratic party can’t understand is that most of the country feels this way.

America has some serious hangups about weddings. They waste copious amounts of money on the things, as if somehow the ceremony itself were more important than the institution of marriage. While millions of Americans can’t afford health care or homes, they think nothing of spending thousands of dollars on a day’s worth of flowers, doilies, and overcooked flank steak. It’s irrational, but apparantly, very meaningful to a very large segment of the population.

My family was cooped up in a lousy motel in Ellensburg, Washington two summers ago and happened upon a TV program called “For Better or For Worse,” where people let their friends plan their wedding in a week for a budget of only $5,000. Mothers cried rivers over such fundamental issues as the color of their daughter’s wedding dress, or whether to invite their second cousin’s dog to the ceremony. Apparently this sort of program resonates with America, because last I checked, the program was still on.

If Americans are reduced to tears at the thought of a taupe-colored wedding dress, imagine how they feel about a man wearing one. This is what the Democratic party simply doesn’t get. This issue is losing them votes. America is not ready for gay marriage.

Here’s what Kerry should have said about the issue at the DNC: “I am opposed to gay marriage. I think most Americans are opposed to it, too, so we should make it clear that no state needs to recognize another state’s laws about gay marriage.” And then he should have moved on. The crowd would have stood silently, and been ready to cheer when he hit his next big talking point. Maybe someday, gay couples will get the rights they deserve, but again: this is not an issue it’s worth losing the election over.

Yes, it would certainly be convenient for gay couples to sign one document and get all the rights of a heterosexual married couple, but gays can get most of these rights in other ways, through separate health visitation agreements, property ownership agreements, etc. They don’t need state-sanctioned marriage to get these things. It’s more paperwork, but it’s certainly not Nazi-like oppression of homosexuals. There are some more significant issues, such as health coverage, but millions of other Americans are losing health coverage for completely unrelated reasons. There is no need to rewrite marriage laws to expand health coverage.

In a just world, everyone would have an equal right to marriage — and I think that’s a world we need to work towards. Just not right now. Let’s work on decreasing the bigotry against gays first. Demanding marital rights for gays is only going to increase the hatred.

I’m starting research for a new book about marriage and family. I’ll be writing here about my research, so you’ll start to see a lot more posts on marriage. In fact, I’ve created an entire new category, “marriage,” to distinguish these research-oriented posts. I created the category so I can easily find all my writing on the subject, but you can use it too: if you find you’re getting sick of posts about marriage, just click on the “General” category in the sidebar, and you’ll get all of my posts except the ones about marriage.

The question of the day: are men pigs for wanting their wives to do all the housework, laundry, shopping, taking care of kids, shopping, etc.? Stephanie Coontz, writing in her book The Way We Really Are says no:

Research shows that men are happiest in a relationship when they don’t have to do much housework and yet meals get made, clothes get ironed, and the house looks good. This doesn’t mean they are chauvinist pigs. Who wouldn’t be happier under those conditions? (19)

Of course, in the most basic sense, Coontz is right. But how come most women don’t expect men to do all the housework? Isn’t it piggish to expect others to do something we’re not willing to do ourselves? Coontz says it’s all about “situated social power”:

Various groups in society have unequal access to economic resources, political power, social status, and these social differences limit how fair or equal a personal relationship between two individuals from different groups can really be. Such social imbalances affect personal behavior regardless of sincere intentions of both parties to “not let it make a difference” (15).

Since men have more situated social power, women feel obligated to do the grunt work in a household, for fear that their husbands will leave them. Furthermore, women are the traditional rulers of the household, so they treat men as inferior when it comes to household tasks, especially caring for infant children. Women themselves play a role in perpetuating male chauvinism.

My problem with this analysis, which seems to me to be mostly on the mark, is that even men who are aware of this dynamic fall into the same trap. Why can’t they, with their larger share of social power, demand a more substantive role, especially when it comes to child rearing? Why do they allow women to hoard the larger share of their childrens’ affection? Coontz would say that it’s because the women don’t allow it, and they are the ones with more situated social power when it comes to child rearing. Coontz is probably right, but I’d take this analysis one step further: the “liberated” men who recognize that women traditionally are excluded from power actually exacerbate the problem by overcompensating. They defer to women, especially when it comes to household tasks: precisely the area they need to be more assertive if they are to create a more equal environment. The result is the “second shift” for women, a situation where even in “egalitarian,” dual-career marriages, the women typically end up doing most of the housework, taking over almost the entire “second shift” themselves. The liberated man’s “good intentions” can lead to unhealthy families, to depression, to divorce.