The Strange World of Professor Robert George

Robert George, founder of National Organization for Marriage, has taken to the pages of the National Review in response to President Obama's support for marriage equality. With two others, George has authored a piece titled Marriage and the Presidency.

In addition to George, the polemic is co-authored by Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis. All three of these people are associated with the Opus Dei front organization, Witherspoon Institute. Anderson is editor of their organ, Public Discourse. George is one of the founders and Girgis is a research scholar at this extremist Catholic enterprise. To suggest that their views are shaped by anything other than their ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Catholicism is difficult, if not impossible, to accept.

The authors draw a rather startling conclusion:

The president has now created a platform for this very discussion; and it is a discussion we look forward to having. For as Obama himself implied, this is not a dispute featuring “bigots” on one side, any more than it has “perverts” on the other. It is a debate of reasonable people of goodwill who disagree about the nature of the most basic unit of society.

I am amazed because Princeton Professor George personally orchestrated the attacks on Kevin Jennings, an Obama appointee to the US Department of Education and founder of GLSEN. At the core of that attack was George's assertion that Mr. Jennings was a threat to the "innocence" of children. In fact, George created a separate division of his American Principles Project and called it Preserve Innocence     solely to attack Jennings.  He appeared in videos trumpeting the innocence meme. George even offered doctored transcripts of purported Jennings remarks. That material has since been scrubbed from the site and the link is dead. Shocking, I know.

It is no surprise, then, that National Organization for marriage has always based their campaigns on the manufactured notion that gay people are a threat to children. Professor George set the example during the Proposition 8 contest, a time when George was involved in the day-to-day workings of NOM.

Thus it is Robert George, himself, who called gay people "perverts" and who behaved as a bigot.

Now he want to have a civilized discussion? Now he wants a debate of "reasonable people of goodwill?" Is there even one example of George extending the slightest measure of goodwill to the LGBT community?

Professor George has forfeited any right that he may have had to enter into a "discussion" about marriage equality.

Related articles

• Opus NOM