let her eat bread

German actress Diane Kruger plays Marie Antoinette in Farewell, My Queen, what one reviewer calls “a matter-of-fact treatment of lesbianism.”

And next she will play Abraham Lincoln’s step-mother. Tough gig, that, since she has to master a 19^th century Kentucky accent.

You can find out much more than you want to know about Ms. Kruger in an interview in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

She is quite the fashion expert, and you can find out what shoes she recently bought (Givenchy) as well as her opinion of European politics and monetary policy. She was really happy when Spain beat Italy in the recent European Football Championship and she likes living in American because we have such a “get-to-it” attitude.

One thing she doesn’t plan on “getting to,” however, is marriage, although family and children are important to her.  Her life is more interesting than a movie, she claims.  And she wants to have kids: “I wouldn’t want life to pass by without having that experience.”

But marriage, she says, is unlikely, even though she wants to be in a movie about falling in love, presumably with a guy.

“I don’t believe that a piece of paper can keep two people together,” she says.

Clearly there is something wrong with this picture.  What if the kids wouldn’t want to let life pass by without the experience of parents who were committed to each other?   But I agree with her entirely that a piece of paper can’t keep two people together. It’s a covenant that does that, a sacred promise to do and not do certain things.

The article describes her as “remarkably grounded.”  Really?

But what do I know?  I’m not as “equally versed in the European crisis as she is in the history of couture.”  I’m just a guy who has been keeping a promise for 38 years.

Kruger is not alone in her attitudes about marriage, of course.  I know a young “Christian” couple that is sleeping together because their love is “pure.”   What could a piece of paper add to that, they wonder. Nothing, really.  But marriage could add a great deal.

Marriage is, among other things, a demonstration of God’s covenant love for his people.  It is this even if the marriage isn’t Christian.   It was deigned by God for this reason. And it is a covenant as surely as the covenants He makes with his people.

The wedding, not the paper, signifies this—a promise made before witnesses, just as such covenants have been made for thousands of years.

I’m not sure Marie Antoinette was as frivolous or as superficial as history has made her out to be.  And I’m not sure Diane Kruger who plays her in Farewell, my Queen is as frivolous or as superficial as I have made her out to be, either.

But her view of marriage is.