Commentary
One of the funniest and most original Monty Python skits finds a man paying a receptionist to have an argument with one of her fellow office workers, who does this for a living. But he enters the wrong door. “This is abuse,” he is told by another employee whose job it is to insult paying clients.
One couldn’t be blamed for wondering if abusing your own customers is no longer in the realm of chic absurdist BBC comedy but forms part of the business plan of the Minneapolis-based Target retail corporation. It was in 1996—not exactly the Middle Ages—when a Democratic president of the United States named Bill Clinton signed the quite popular Defense of Marriage Act. The law prevented states from being forced “to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other state, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage” under other states’ laws. And it declared that “the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”…