If the wingnuts were serious about defending marriage, they'd make it harder to get divorced. But seeing how many of them are on their third or fourth wife (not to mention the high divorce rates in the red states), that dog ain't gonna hunt.

Of course, if the wingnuts were really serious about defending marriage, they'd be working to improve the economic climate for ordinary folks instead of pandering to the wealthy and corporate special interests. A huge number of marriages founder over economic issues.

My own take is that the push for same-sex marrriage shows the institution's strength, not its weakness. Marriage must have something going for it if everyone wants to do it!

You say your aunt and grandfather are cracking under the strain of caring for both your grandmother and her dog. Why not get some outside help to lighten their load? Here are some things that you can look into:

- Hire a dog-walker for the Yorkie. Also look into obedience training.

- Hire a cleaning service so that Aunt and Grandfather don't waste their time and energy scrubbing the toilet. Ditto yardwork and similar tasks.

- Investigate adult daycare and respite care for your grandmother, to give your aunt and grandfather a break. Ditto in-home caregivers, nursing services, etc. Your local social services agencies can help.

- Make sure your grandfather is getting proper medical care; especially, talk to your grandfather's doctor about his depression. Same goes for your aunt. It sounds like they may be at risk for caregiver's syndrome: when caregivers of an ill person don't take care of themselves, and end up dying before their charge does.

- Eventually -- probably sooner than they think -- your aunt and grandfather will no longer be able to look after your grandmother. They need to look into assisted living and nursing facilities NOW, while they still have some sort of control over the situation, instead of waiting until one or the other of them is incapacitated.

The dog is only the symbol of your difficulty. Getting rid of the Yorkie may briefly make life easier, but it's not going to change the underlying problem: your grandmother's dementia. However, if your aunt and grandfather can get some assistance, they will be better able to care for both Grandma and her dog.

I'm holding out for an ebook reader that still functions after it's been tossed in a damp and sandy beach bag, dropped in the bathtub, run over with a bicycle, been spat-up upon by a toddler, knocked down a flight of steps, and left out in the rain. One with a full-color, extremely high resolution display that handles graphics and text equally well. One with an open, natural language-based interface that's had hundreds of years of user-testing. One available on media that could potentially last for centuries. One with a well-developed aftermarket and a centralized repository where I can borrow all sorts of etexts for free (not just out-of-copyright works).

Oh, wait, it's already available.

Salon did a feature a while back on guys who owned realistic, custom-made, life-sized sex dolls. These dolls may be the precursors to Farhad's robotic lovers. It was striking how some of these men treated their dolls as companions. But of course they always realized that their dolls were just toys, substitutes for real female companionship.

On to literature, movies and TV. "The Silver Metal Lover," a novel by Tanith Lee, describes the romance between a highly realistic, artificially intelligent android and a dumpy, ordinary-looking girl. It covered most of the ground about human-robot relationships, including sex and free will.

"Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," a short story about an artificial child by Brian Aldiss (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.01/ffsupertoys.html)focused on the relationship between parents and their robot son. But many of the points it made would be valid for any sort of loving relationship between a human and a robot. It was later made into the movie "AI" by Kubrick/Spielberg, which did feature robotic prostitutes.

And then there's Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who was capable of love as well as other emotions (and IIRC had a fling with Tasha Yar). Others have mentioned Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica.

But if we're talking about robot lovers, as opposed to robotic sex toys, the bar is set pretty high. A robot lover would have to be physically highly realistic, pretty much indistinguishable from humans. Otherwise, it would plunge deep into the uncanny valley. And it would have to pass the Turing Test and behave indistinguishably from a human being. To have a true human-style loving relationship, the robot would have to possess free will and be able to choose whether to return the love of its owner. Otherwise, it's back to the kid in "Super-Toys"/"AI" who was programmed to love and couldn't do a thing about it.

Robots are getting pretty sophisticated, but there's still a lot of ground to cover before we are looking at the kind of physically hyper-realistic robots that could potentially become love objects -- let alone the sophisticated programming that would enable them to behave like humans. We have autonomous robots that can handle navigation through complicated urban environments right now, but this is a cakewalk compared to the complexity and subtlety of human relationships.