The sooner anti-gay prejudice is widely acknowledged to be as intellectually indefensible as racism and sexism, the better.

I think you misread my comment — I didn’t say that disapproval needed to be based on hatred or bigotry, just that there is a continuum here along which one bleeds into another. Human emotions aren’t that easily compartmentalized.

As for your disapproval of smoking on airplanes, all we have to support your statement that it’s not based on hatred of smokers is your own assertion.

Obama opposes marriage equality – that is a discernable shift from those who support marriage equality. For you to claim this is the same as Exodus defining change in ways that include no discernable shift is quite simply incorrect.

LOL, that’s quite a broad statement – your self-confidence might be just a tad overdone.

Once again, for the court to refer to the entire 7 million who voted for prop 8 and say none of them were motivated by ill will is absolutely absurd. If you can’t acknowledge that that certainly can’t be true for all those voters then it is you for whom there is no retreat, it is you has to be always right, and it is you who is not making sense.

You may indeed hate screaming children. I don’t pretend to have any insight into the workings of your emotions. But I very much doubt that drawing from your own personal experience is the best tool for determining the motivations of the California electorate.

And while “they lied for political reasons” may be an answer that allows you to resolve the conflict between the ruling and your own notions about what defines bigotry, it is one that is implausible to the point of discounting your entire premise.

I know that there is no retreat for you. Ever. So rather than continue along the futile path of reason, I’ll just accept that like the ex-gay movement, the Pope, and the more colorful conservative activists, you use language in ways that are dissimilar from everyone else.

I’ll just keep in mind that while no one else defines “bigot” to include Barack Obama, that this is your own special definition, much in the same way that Exodus used to define change in ways that included no discernable shift at all.

The upside of having ones own definitions is that it allows you to always be right. The downside is that you cease making sense.

I don’t think it is a fuzzy boundary at all. People disapprove of things all the time without the disapproval being based on hatred or bigotry. For instance, I disapprove of smoking on airplanes. The disapproval is clearly not based on hatred of smokers.

Disapproval and hatred, bigotry and a desire to deny recognition are the same type of emotions, they only differ in degree.

Just as I would call both a child who steals a penny candy and Bernie Madoff theives everyone who opposes gay equality is a bigot. Both Obama and Rick Santorum are bigots although certainly not on the same scale.

Its laughable for the court to say about all Californians that the inference one must draw is not one of ill will, but one of disaproval. There’s no doubt that for a LOT of those Californians they deeply hate gays and wish to harm them as much as legally possible. For the others that feel perhaps much less strongly, at the very least they wish to deny gays a fundamental good, the recognition of marriage – wanting to deprive someone of something good is ill will!

The court made the statement about ill will for political reasons such as softening the critical statement it was making about Californians, they did not make that statement because it was true.

It’s a fuzzy boundary — just where does disapproval bleed off into bigotry, and when does fear become hatred? (Because if you go back and think about the Prop 8 campaign, a major element was fear.)

I think the court was being, for lack of a better term, judicious in its language, and whatever my personal feelings about the basis of Prop 8, I think the panel hit the right note. It’s also consistent with the way decisions were phrased in Romer and Lawrence — the key term is “disapproval,” and there’s really no need to determine whether that disapproval is rational or not. As Timothy notes, their point was that there’s no rational link between Prop 8 and any discernible government interest. That’s the important part. The motivations of the voters, whether they were based on hatred, fear, or indigestion, aren’t the determining factor. It’s the result that matters.

As for Santorum, whether you listen to him or read the transcript, the man’s incoherent, and he’ll say whatever suits his purpose. The problem is that to any sane person, his purpose is appalling.