Georgia GOP Chairwoman Sue Everhart has been the subject of a lot of Internet hate and ridicule for suggesting that marriage equality will open up a new avenue for straight fraudsters to cheat the rest of us by entering into sham marriages to get their hands on the massive, taxpayer funded benefits that the institution of marriage provides.
But really the only problem I see with Everhart's statement is just that it doesn't go far enough.
In fact I have it on good authority that thousands, perhaps even millions, of currently-married couples are in fact only pretending to love each other. By living together, under the same roof, and engaging in activities such as furniture-shopping, child-rearing, having other couples over for dinner, eating in front of the TV whilst watching Mad Men, and even sleeping together in the same bed, these frauds perpetuate the image of being married when in fact, the love they profess to each other through the sacred and immortal institution of marital bliss is only a show. Once the surface of these faux marriages is scratched, the emotional reality is found to be something quite different--usually because SOMEONE can't be BOTHERED to pick a dirty sock off the bedroom floor, or clean their hair out of the drain after showering.
So let me propose (modestly) a solution to this problem. Using the powers of federal government as enumerated in the 2002 Homeland Security Act, we need to create a new cadre of dedicated, highly trained Marriage Inspectors, shouldered with the awesome responsibility of Defending the Institution of Marriage. These inspectors will form an elite MarriCorps who will fan out over the highways and byways of the country, making sure that these desperate criminals and their nefarious plans to defraud the country of its rightful tax revenues by filing jointly are exposed and stopped for once and all.
Now, the question of just how MarriCorps officers will do this is an interesting one. Clearly, they must be trained to understand what marriage is, and what it isn't. They should therefore have an encyclopedic knowledge of Disney films, Leave It To Beaver episodes, and Norman Rockwell paintings, as I'm sure you would agree that those resources provide the clearest idea of what the Institution of Marriage ought to look like. They should also be highly trained in a variety of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, which, as every knows, is the only effective way of getting married couples to admit their actual feelings about each other.
Still, how to know, for certain, whether a couple really is married or is just pretending to be in order to be able to use each other's library cards? The answer is really quite simple. Inspection must of course be surprise, otherwise people will "game the system." Married couples will be interrogated separately, in separate rooms with no possibility of collusion.
The MarriCorps officer will first ask one of the so-called "married persons" a series of questions and carefully write down their answers. Then, the same questions will be asked of the other potential marriage-scofflaw, but he or she will be asked to provide as an answer, not what he or she thinks, but what he or she thinks his partner answered.
Some sample questions could include:
1. What is the strangest place you've made whoopie?
2. How would you rate your [wife|husband]'s morning breath?
3. If your spouse was a [cartoon character|superhero|type of sushi] what would they be?
4. Really, what is the strangest place you've made whoopie (and don't say "in the butt" this time)?
By this simple and empirically sound method, I have every confidence that our brave MarriCorps officers could quickly and easily sort out the real married couples from the pretenders. Thereby giving really married people a renewed confidence in their marriage that can only come from governmental approval.
As for the ones who get caught faking it--their punishment will be that they must remain married to each other for the rest of their lives.