Snobs

Dylan Matthews is absolutely right that the New York Times readers who object to the inclusion of the marriage of two recovering addicts in the paper's Vows section on the grounds that they aren't of sufficiently good family are horrible snobs, and Clark Hoyt was correct to take them down a peg. The only thing I think Hoyt might have added is that people who think they're "good enough" to be on the Vows page might think twice before they risk hoisting themselves on their own petards. As the brilliant New Yorker humorist Veronica Geng wrote in her piece "Partners," a succession of entirely formal Vows announcements peppered with increasingly insane details, "''The bride, married at the Presbyterian Church and Trust, is an alumna of the Royal Doulton School and Loot University. Her father is retired from the family consortium. She is also a descendant of Bergdorf Goodman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her previous marriage ended in pharmaceuticals.'' In other words, no one's of too good a family to have absurd events and people in their family tree. And being of a "good family" is no indicator of moral value.