Signs, signs, everywhere a sign

While at the zoo with my granddaughter this week, I observed many posted rules and prohibitions. Here are a few:

“No stopping on the stairs leading up to the giraffe-feeding deck.” “No more than one rider at a time per pony.” “Children must meet the height and weight requirements in order to ride.” “No guests permitted inside the trail, due to safety regulations.” “No loud noises or throwing.” “No standing on the walls.” “No touching the fence.” “No smoking within the zoo.” “No hanging on the ropes.”

I contemplated the recent decades of proliferation of restrictions on all forms of human behavior—far more safety regulations than I can recall from my childhood, where we rode in cars without seatbelts and played on the foundations of new housing construction after the crews had gone home for the day.

I marveled at the limitless capacity of committees to conjure up all sorts of hypothetical dangers latent in all normal human activities. They have removed the seesaws from the local parks because … one never knows. A nearby farm has ended years of tradition by now forbidding patrons from petting Wilbur the pig, their redoubled effort to rid the earth of E. coli.

Having contemplated all this, I thought to myself how curious it is that there is one glaring countervailing example to the modern penchant to aim for zero danger and harm in the social spheres of men. That example is the headlong rush across this land to overturn centuries of tradition of heterosexual marriage and quickly sanction a grand untested experiment of homosexual marriage.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?