Opinion/Mark Steyn: The other day in France a woman married a corpse. For some reason, this reminded me of Democratic Party primary voters and John Kerry.
But others drew different conclusions. Because marrying a dead person is apparently entirely legal in la republique Francaise, a gay activist wrote to me from San Francisco to point out that a French corpse has more rights than a California gay. True, but the French corpse has a duller club scene. The grass is always greener on the other side, particularly when you're six feet under it.
But these days proponents of gay marriage have no trouble plucking examples from the newspapers of the mess the straights have made of matrimony. Though there were no speeches at the actual "ceremony", there's been plenty of retrospective commentary about the nuptials of Mr Jason Allen Alexander and Ms Britney Spears. As you may recall, Ms Spears had a night on the town in Vegas and woke up the next morning married to Mr Alexander, the latter having neglected to observe the niceties by formally asking Ms Spears' management and record company for her hand in marriage.
A judge stepped in and sorted it out and the bride was restored to the status quo ante. And ever since folks have been weighing in. The columnist Andrew Sullivan recently observed that the Britney-Jason union was not exactly the best advertisement for President Bush's view that marriage is "sacred": she and her pal are allowed to make a two-day travesty of marriage, yet a devoted lesbian couple who've been together for half-a-century are denied benefit of clergy.
National Review's Deroy Murdock followed this up with a column citing various other unsatisfactory poster children for heterosexual family values - proud but unwed dad David Letterman, marriage-wrecker Jerry Seinfeld - and demanded to know: "Where was the social-conservative outrage?"
He has a point, though not quite the one he thinks he's making. The salient fact about Britney is not that she's straight or gay but that she's a celebrity, which is an orientation all its own. The rules are different.
A year or two back, when Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman split up citing irreconcilable differences in height, the celeb magazine editors reacted as the rest of us would if gram'pa ditched grammy after 73 years and set off to find that hootchy-kootchy dancer he'd met in a bar in Yellowknife in 1923. Tom and Nicole had been married for, oh, over half a decade which, in celebrity years, is practically a diamond anniversary. But eventually they too went the way of all the other "long-term" Hollywood couples - Bruce and Demi, Alec and Kim, Dennis and Meg, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie.
The last two were doomed from the start: like Britney, Rin just woke up one Sunday morning with a hell'uva hangover and a strange furry tongue lapping his chops. Fortunately, a veterinarian in Palm Springs was able to get the whole thing annulled.
But I mention them because celebrities have always been carrying on like this. Hollywood in the Twenties was a lot more debauched than, say, Des Moines. Very occasionally, word leaked out, and somebody wound up with a one-way ticket on the oblivion express.
But most of the time nobody heard a thing about it. My father loves Al Jolson, "the world's greatest entertainer" - Mammy, Swanee, Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With A Dixie Melody, he can do 'em in his sleep. But, if ever we're arguing late at night and I want to bring the conversation to a close, I usually just mention the rumours about Jolson being bisexual. "He was not!" roars my dad.
Pa usually flounces off in a huff, or makes the point that it doesn't count because in those days everyone in Hollywood was bisexual. Even if that's not true, it might as well be: the normal rules didn't apply, as long as you were discreet. The normal rules still don't apply, but now there's no need to be discreet. Half a century ago, Ingrid Bergman gave birth out of wedlock and it almost finished her career. Now, single mom Jodie Foster is put on the cover of People magazine as a paragon of motherhood, and everyone thinks it's bad form to inquire who or where the dad is.
In a way, the licence accorded to celebrities is only the republican version of that accorded to your average crowned head back in the good old days. But it was inevitable that, in a country with as vigorous a democratic spirit as America, this would eventually have to be conducted in the open: instead of the divine right of kings, Washington has citizen legislators; likewise, instead of droit du seigneur, Hollywood has citizen sex-fiends. The real question implicit in Deroy Murdock's finger-pointing at Letterman, Seinfeld and co is whether an entire society can live like celebrities. I don't know why they'd want to - most celebrities I've known are rather sad creatures, and, as with her accelerated marital collapse, poor old Britney, 22 going on 49, seems to have reached that unhappy stage.
But the story of the last 30 years is the mainstreaming of rock star morality: instant gratification, do your own thing, whatever's your bag. Jodie Foster and her turkey baster are rich enough to weather any unintended consequences of their fling, but the evidence suggests that, for the general population, defining celebrity down is more problematic.
"Oops! I Did It Again" is easy for Britney to say.