Not if you were the last candidate on Earth.
Not if you were the last candidate on earth, Ben.

Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon who's currently famous for being famous, insinuated to CNBC the other day that if we let those gays get married, there'd be no reason to stop bigamists from getting married. And possibly also a whole bunch of "other groups," whom he declined to name, but with a sly glance he invited the viewer to fill in the blank with the sex perverts of their choice.

This behavior is not particularly becoming for a presidential candidate. But it oughta play well for a contributor to Fox News, which is a job that Carson actually has a shot at getting.

There are nearly zero people who believe that Ben Carson could actually become president. (Notable exceptions: the gullible few that he's managed to convince to give him money for a campaign that will fizzle within a few months.) Ben himself is smart enough to know that he won't be occupying the White House anytime soon.

But thankfully, Sarah Palin has blazed a new bath for political Paris Hiltons like him. All he needs to do is pretend to run for president for a few months, get a bunch of attention, avoid doing anything too Herman-Cainy, and hey presto, here's a guest spot on a conservative news show!

His strategy so far seems to be lashing out at LGBT people whenever possible. You might recall his brilliant hypothesis that prison sex turns men gay, followed by a nonpology that included a "but we're all made in God's image" dog whistle to religious nuts. Ben's learned that saying nasty things about queers gets him coverage, and so in that regard his latest attack has been totally successful.

But it's also a good opportunity to talk about why he is wrong wrong wrong to compare gay marriage to polygamy. The difference is pretty obvious, but for some reason it's eluded even Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who asked about it during oral argument last month: From a legal perspective, marriage for LGBT people is so similar to marriage for straight people that all you have to do is change the genders on a few forms. But marriage for multiple partners introduces a multidimensional Rubik's Cube of dependencies and obligations. Inheritance, custody, immigration, benefits—it all becomes exponentially more complicated when you have more than one person with a valid claim to a spouse.

Of course, these are legal issues that could be sorted out eventually (and probably with relative ease, considering that poly groups have been navigating these arrangements for as long as humanity has existed). But the shift to accommodate polygamy is so much more complicated than the shift to accommodate LGBT people that they're really not comparable at all.

But hey, who cares? Outrage! Headlines! Book deal! Someone doing an impression on SNL! That's what the presidential campaign is really about.