First U.S. illegitimacy reached 33 percent. Then the married couple became a minority. Then gay marriages received a court blessing. And now this -- wife-carrying competitions that don't require actual wives. That's right. The world wife-carrying championship, which was recently held in Finland, allows unmarried couples to compete.

Unfamiliar with wife-carrying? Well, friends, you are missing out. Imagine your better half clinging to your torso, her thighs wrapped about the top of your head, her arms clutching your waist, as you wade through water and jump over hurdles in a desperate contest to beat all the other husbands to win the grand prize, your wife's weight in beer. European beer, no less. The kama sutra has nothing to top this, believe me.

Only now, the rotten heart of Europe has decayed even this time-honored Norse tradition, to the point that a man and woman shacked up and childless, with nothing to do all day but go to work and exercise, can compete against couples who've had the courage to tie the knot, bear children, and take on all the extra weight that entails. I mean, anybody can walk into a bar, throw two or three skinny single gals over his shoulder, and run a couple of miles. It takes a real man to carry a woman who isn't desperately keeping her waist-size to Ally McBeal proportions.

As can be expected, once the Europeans distort a social norm, East Coast Americans will quickly follow suit. And this contest announcement from the North American Wife Carrying Championships openly admits as much:

"The title can be deceiving - wife can mean someone else's wife or no one's wife - as long as it's a male-female team."

Apparently we weren't content just to relax the marriage requirement, we threw in wife-swapping. And you thought the 70's were dead.

But surely the male-female requirement will soon fall by the wayside as well, as hyperactive gay activists and their stormtrooper lesbian muscle issue a barrage of fussy press releases besmirching the wife-carrying competition as an example of heterosexual oppression. It will quickly be renamed the "Partner Carrying Competition," and will probably occasion a brief sports comeback by Martina Navratilova.

We won't stop there, however, because soon the Alone and Proud of Ourselves crowd -- fresh from a court victory requiring corporations to extend maternity leave coverage to singles who've just purchased a cat -- will begin grousing over all this "partner" language. So, the contest will be renamed the "Person You May or May Not Be Currently Humping-Carrying Competition," which will spread the sexual and gender confusion further, but will at least open the door to some serious network television sponsorship.

But we can't be done, you see, because we will still be excluding the differently abled, whose walkers and wheelchairs aren't so simpatico with an obstacle course. Thus we'll need to replace the obstacles with a smooth path made of at least 40% recycled tires, and eliminate the "Carrying" part of the contest, because this evokes a dependence on others that riles disabled activists. They can get by just fine without any help -- once you provide the primo parking spaces and ramp over three-quarters of civilization, of course -- and they don't appreciate all this "carrying" talk.

So once we're finished making this competition into something that fits our modern lifestyles, we'll no longer have a wife-carrying contest, we'll have a lot of bitter people wheeling and limping and grousing along a walking path. Nobody will want to watch anymore, but that won't stop the television networks; they'll just weave this new sport into their Women's NBA schedule. Gatorade will make commercials featuring the reigning dyslexic lesbian champion celebrating by doing little wheelies in her wheelchair. Reebok will provide free shoes to contestants, issued with the disclaimer that its provision of shoes is not intended to suggest that one should wear shoes, or that people without feet are somehow lesser individuals.

In time, parody becomes history. You'll see. All of this means that I will have to retain my amateur status as a wife-carrier of eleven years. Which is fine, because who wants an audience for that sort of thing anyway?