Sanctity of marriage gets another shot in the arm with "I Married a Stranger"

They're at it again — demeaning and trivializing a tradition that is foundational to our society, trying to radically redefine marriage from something that strengthens families into a short-term thrill.

I mean, of course, the Fox network and its reality shows. They've done more to attack marriage than any gay couple ever has.

It started with Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, where 50 women competed to be the bride of a mystery man, leading to a on-air wedding ceremony. (The marriage was annulled a couple months later.) Three years later, Fox gave us Married By America, where participants agreed to enter into arranged marriages, with their spouses picked by viewers who phoned in their votes, American Idol-style.

And now, Fox is considering another series about arranged marriages.

Each episode of I Married a Stranger will focus on a woman who has given up on dating and is willing to marry a stranger picked out by a group of her friends and family. The loved ones will whittle down a group of five guys until they've picked her husband. In the meantime, the bride-to-be meets each guy after he's been rejected. Nothing says "good television" like watching a woman get married with a look of deep regret on her face because she connected with bachelor number three instead of the guy she's marrying.

ABC's The Bachelor and The CW's Hitched or Ditched

Fox may have given us the most notorious shows to trivialize marriage, but they're not alone on the matter. CBS also has its own arranged marriage show in the works, though this one will focus on three couples over the entire season (the Fox show plans to arrange a new marriage every week). Add these newcomers to a wedding party that already includes Hitched or Ditched (currently airing Tuesdays on The CW), NBC's Who Wants to Marry My Dad? and ABC's long-lived The Bachelor/The Bachelorette (with the winner getting a wedding ring and a future breakup date).

Reality TV has a history of making marriage not about a long-term commitment, but as merely the climax to a story. There's nothing to see after the proposal, the ceremony or the honeymoon period. (Only celebrity magazines follow these courtships beyond the season finale.) Soap operas may be similarly wedding-addicted but they, at least, show how marriages fall apart before getting to the next one.

I'd have a tiny bit of respect for groups like the National Organization for Marriage if they spent as much time trying to shame TV networks out of making marriage into cheap entertainment as they do trying to keep gay couples from getting rights like hospital visitation, inheritance rights and joint taxes. To be fair, these shows get some criticism, but it's minor compared to the amount of effort put into fighting marriage equality or the outcry that former Bachelor Brad Womack faced when he decided that neither of the finalists were women he would marry.