Love, Ashley: A Marriage of Convenience’s Irreconcilable Differences

I’ve taken to habitually making a point to TiVo-ing Rachel Maddow so that I can fast forward through the ads.

Especially that ad.

We’ve all seen it: a doughy, Wonder Bread-looking, aging frat boy informs you how sacrosanct and special his marriage is as he rails in righteous indignation against the website AshleyMadison.com — basically a go-between for unfaithful, slutty hets (wives are the target demographic) to get some action on the side. It makes Jesus cry when they do it, but it doesn’t stop them.

His name: Ryan Hill. His organization: MyMarriageMatters.org. The mission statement: “I wuv my blonde trophy wife, and because marriages are just like fading pixies, when you lose faith in yours, mine starts to die.”

There’s been such a deluge of hetero hang-wringing about the dread decline of marriage into travesty that you’re probably tempted to add this kind of self-serving back-patting to the pile, but something about this twatty little twerp just annoyed the hell out me from the first time I encountered his pitch — weirdly, not focused on a select class of people threatening marriage, but an exact service — that I felt compelled to do a little digging.

Evidently, I’m not alone.

Guess what Mr. Hill does for a living: he’s a lawyer. In family law.

A divorce lawyer, to be exact.

That’s right — a man who stridently objects to the undermining of marriage through Free Market-procured adultery actually makes his living from the dissolution of said institution, and certainly no marriage he’s profited from severing has ever cracked up because one spouse ran around on the other.

Even by Right Wing cash-trumps-my-moral-compass cognitive dissonance, this is schizoid to the point of being incredulous, and the the scuttlebutt regarding Hill’s stake in the matter diverges into two theories:

1) He’s a sanctimonious hypocrite so deluded by his own superiority that he’s oblivious to the fact that he’s only aiding Ashley Madison’s public profile and foolishly directing traffic to the site via links and videos he seeks to critique.

2) He’s a well-compensated plant playing at outrage as he essentially presents a covert ad cynically promoting the very service he’s ostensibly condemning.

Seeing as Ashley Madison’s CEO forever finds himself battling with the FCC and major networks for airtime, what better way to let the Big Bad through the front door than to invent a squealing little piggy who’ll cry wolf at the top of his lungs in primetime?

Somebody’s crying wee-wee-wee all the way to the bank.