"It's an institute you can't disparage."

The theme this week on "Theme Time Radio Hour With Bob Dylan": marriage. I like the way the old hipster is blatantly square in matching themes to the calendar. We had mother for Mother's Day, father for Father's Day, and now, marriage for June. He also tells the very squarest jokes he can find on the subject, like: My wife and I were happy for 20 years. Then we met.

He had a lot of good songs, like Darlene Love singing "Today I Met the Boy I'm Gonna Marry" and Etta James doing "Stop the Wedding." And it's nice to note the obvious choices that he didn't do, like "Chapel of Love" and "Band of Gold." He had some old blues songs in there, and Rosemary Clooney singing "I'm Getting Married in the Morning."

A funny thing is that, even after that post last night, the subject of gay marriage never crossed my mind until, late in the show, he played Frank Sinatra singing "Love and Marriage." It's such a fun, sardonic song the way Frank sings it, and most of the time he makes me think he's just talking about how women won't let guys have sex with them unless marriage is part of the deal: you can't have one, you can't have none, you can't have one without the other. But there's that part:

Love and marriage, love and marriage
It's an institute you can't disparage
Ask the local gentry
And they will say it's elementary

Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try, and you will only come
To this conclusion

Okay, so, well, we are asking the local gentry, seeing as how we've got a referendum coming up. And a lot of people think in terms of "defending " marriage, that institute you can't disparage. But if there's an elementary idea that love and marriage go together, and you're delusional if you think you can disaggregate them, then it seems plain -- you will only come to this conclusion -- that human beings who love each other ought to be able to marry.

Sorry. Reasoning from song lyrics again. Frank made me do it, even though I think he's making fun of the words of the song -- and the women who hold out for marriage -- all the way through.

What was Bob's attitude toward marriage? Elusive, as usual. But he ended reciting some lines without saying the author's name:

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Please imagine that said with classic Dylanesque intonation: Love's not Time's fool...