I don’t believe that everyone who advocates against gay marriage is, by definition, a bigot. I believe your position is wrong (for the reasons I advocated), but it sounds as if you’re coming at it more from a conservative point of view where we shouldn’t necessarily make wholesale changes that might cause big downstream negative effects unless we’re sure the world can deal with those effects.

I *do*, however believe that bigotry is one of the most common causes of holding the anti-gay-marriage position. As with many other positions, many people who come to an ideological position from a place of bigotry use plausible rational arguments to justify their position.

Reams of social psychology studies can show that people can rationalize their way into the position they already want to hold quite easily. Breaking out of that psychological tendency is *VERY* hard to do, *even* when you’re aware the phenomenon exists. I’m sure I hold positions I’ve rationalized myself into, even though I try very hard to guard against it and to evaluate evidence on its merits.

However, all that aside, I think the target of my entire post was Gary Bauer. And I believe him, specifically, to be a bigot.

My objection is based purely on the word “marriage”.

I personally believe that government shouldn’t sanction “marriage” at all. Let government give same-sex or opposite-sex couples a “civil union”, and leave the term “marriage” to the churches.

Barring that, though, if the government offers the legal sanction, I believe it’s discriminatory to not offer it to same-sex couples. Will there be some messy years of case law as some of the issues work themselves out? Of course. But that’s true any time laws are changed. That’s why we have courts.

The fact that it’s not perfectly easy and clean is not an argument against offering the same legal rights and privileges to same-sex couples that are offered to opposite-sex couples: it’s a cop-out. It’s a profoundly “conservative” argument that says that we shouldn’t change anything until we can predict in excruciating detail ALL of the effects of the change. But we can NEVER predict all of the effects. Sometimes we have to ask whether the current law is right or wrong. In this case I’d contend that it’s wrong, and if we change it, the messy work of hammering out the details is simply a price we pay for righting a wrong.

Ray obviously didn’t read [or didn't understand] the post.

Ray,

I am in support of gay marriage. The purpose of this post was criticizing Gary Bauer for his confused and ridiculous claims about the nature of free speech.