In a post to this blog from several days ago, I linked same-sex marriage and the civil unrest in Baltimore. I knew that it was a stretch, but I was attempting to say that our society and our media are all too willing to look at the surfaces of issues and not at the underlying complexities that will require much more extended public attention and civic determination to resolve. Indeed, I knew that connecting the two issues in any way—even so broadly–was such a stretch that I pointedly framed my discussion of the civil unrest in Baltimore as a digression.

Well, apparently Texas congressman Bill Flores felt no such reservations. This past week, Flores was a guest on Washington Watch, a radio program hosted by Tony Perkins, the President of the Family Research Council. The ostensible topic for discussion was the rally outside the Supreme Court protesting the arguments being made against state laws banning same-sex marriage.

But Flores took the discussion in a direction that even Perkins may not have anticipated:

“Let’s talk about poverty, for instance. The single best indicator of whether or not a child is going to be in poverty or not is whether or not they were raised by a two-parent household or a single parent household, so the breakdown of the family has contributed to poverty. Look at what is going on in Baltimore today. You see the issues that are raised there. Healthy marriages are the ones between a man and a woman because they can have a healthy family and they can raise children in a way that’s best for their future, not only socially but psychologically, economically, from a health perspective. There is nothing like traditional marriage that does that for a child. Each of us have a mother and a father and there is no way to get around that.”

In essence, Flores argued that because same-sex marriage violates the concept of the traditional family and because the breakdown of the traditional two-parent family has often been cited as a characteristic of very economically degraded neighborhoods, then same-sex marriage can fairly be described as a contributing factor in the civil unrest in Baltimore.

Wow. One certainly cannot argue lucidly with that kind of logic.

But I hope that Flores realizes that by employing that kind of logic, I, and anyone else who cares to do so, can make him responsible for just about anything that occurs not just in this country by anywhere in the world.

So, here’s the challenge, construct the logical support for how a Texas congressman may have contributed to the earthquake in Nepal. (Hint: everywhere where there is a concentrated use of hydraulic-fracturing technology, there has been a dramatic increase in earthquakes, not just because of the “fracking” process itself but also because of the deep-injection wells into which the wastewater from the “fracking” process is being pumped. And Texas, like Oklahoma, is, of course, a major oil-producing state.)

The quotation from Flores is available in an item posted on the website Right-Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gop-rep-bill-flores-links-baltimore-riots-gay-marriage