Because for all their frantic denials their is no difference between denying people marriage because of something they cant change and doesn’t affect them in any way 40 years ago and denying people marriage because of something they cant change and doesn’t affect them in any way today. If the people opposed to gays marrying aren’t bigots, then neither are the people opposed to interracial marriage. I refuse to pretend theirs some massive difference in circumstance when no one has ever been able to show me one.

El Rose, nobody’s trying to take anything away from you or Maggie. Remember that.

And that is the crucial difference.

It’s one thing to believe something and another to insist same sex couples can’t get married whether or not they believe it too. That’s injecting those beliefs into the lives of other people. Other decent, loving, devoted people, who don’t deserve having their hopes and dreams dashed apart on the barren shoals of Gallagher’s beliefs.

The scorched earth war to deny gay couples the right to marry starts with a bedrock premise that the nature of the love between men or between women is so sterile, so grotesque, as to place it so far beyond the pale of normalcy that even the mere suggestion that it might possibly be of the same devoted and loving nature as heterosexual unions amounts to a profane attack on heterosexuals. That’s where this is coming from. No where else. Every time NOM insists that marriage is between a man and a woman they are saying, in effect, that homosexual couples don’t love, they just have sex, that homosexuals are not so fully human that they Can love, honor and cherish in the way heterosexuals do. Every cheap rationalization for excluding same-sex couples from the sanctuary of marriage boils down, sooner or later, to this one thing: that homosexual unions aren’t unions at all, but hollow, if not profane imitations of genuine heterosexual ones. One of the NOM board members, Orson Scott Card, has said so explicitly.

It is an assault, not just on our households, but on our essential human identity. Gallagher there is merely complaining that the people her political machine is brutalizing are fighting back. But this is not the 1950s. Gay folk don’t suffer quietly in silence anymore. We are not monsters, we are not empty shells, we are human beings. It is grotesque to accuse this community of being bullies simply for defending the honor and the dignity of our love.

Or perhaps Gallagher herself would merely shrug and quietly slink off were the government to cut off Her marriage ring. If so, then I am sorry for her.