Yeah, all that would make sense for something called the National Organization for Marriage. Instead they exist solely for the purpose of keeping gay people from getting married. They're currently all in a tiff about the California state supreme court's ruling on Thursday that overturned the state's ban on homosexual marriage. This is it for California - the U.S. Supreme Court has no say over state laws on this issue, so barring a state constitutional amendment, gay marriage is in California to stay. Boy are the conservative groups upset. Obviously, of course, if gay folks can get married, the government will soon afterwards invalidate all heterosexual marriages and then pair us all with randomly matched same-sex partners. One in five of us will instead be paired with a random zoo animal.
No, wait, that's not right...
Oh, oh, now I remember! If gays folks can get married it doesn't affect the rest of us for squat. I've been reading NOM's website all morning, and I've read all three variants of their arguments against gay marriage (The NOM is multilingual- they speak Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish!), and I've yet to really see any justification for their position other than "we're uncomfortable with it on religious grounds", which is a legitimate feeling but not necessarily the best way to set national policy. Their answer to the question "Will same-sex marriage hurt your marriage" is as follows:
Same-sex marriage advocates want to force everyone to dramatically and permanently alter our definition of marriage and family. The great, historic cross-cultural understanding of marriage as the union of husband and wife will be called bigotry in the public square. The law will teach your children and grandchildren that there is nothing special about mothers and fathers raising children together, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot.
Now, let's look at this. They're afraid that the government will make them think nice things about married homosexuals. That's a pretty pallid argument, not to mention the fact that they're already successfully resisting the aggregate weight of the entirety of modernity on other social issues, so what's a little government compared to that? Maybe if this statement were about something that the light of modernity has already shone brightly upon it would help us think about this more clearly:
Anti-slavery advocates want to force everyone to dramatically and permanently alter our definition of what constitutes a human being. The great, historic cross-cultural understanding of humanity as consisting only of the European races will be called bigotry in the public square. The law will teach your children and grandchildren that there is nothing special about people of European ancestry raising children together, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a bigot.
I'm aware that that comparison is a bit of hyperbole, but there's often something to be learned from exaggeration. The fact of the matter is that civil rights for minorities are very often opposed by the majority. Societal inertia in favor of a particular situation does not necessarily make the situation an equitable one. This is an issue of people have a rabid ideological opposition to something that won't effect them in the least.
Now, I don't care if churches don't want to perform homosexual marriages. No one is saying that they have to, and it would be an abhorrent breach of the the First Amendment for the government to legislate religious practices that way anyway. However, if a homosexual couple wants to be married by either a liberal church or by an agent of the state, I can see no legitimate reason to oppose that. What adults do with other willing adults is a matter of their own consciences about which the state should have no say.
*Ironically, the divorce rates sits somewhat higher among self-described "born-again" Christians, Baptists in particular, and is the lowest nationally among self-described atheists/agnostics and Catholics.
