I'm still waiting ...

Yesterday I wrote about Ryan T. Anderson and his mentor, Robby George and their continuing opposition to marriage equality. Later in the day, LifeSiteNews went into this torturously verbose treatise agonizing over the passage of equal marriage by Britain's House of Lords which the Queen has now assented to.

Then there is another little bit of sophistry. A group of religious zealots is petitioning the Catholic Church to withhold communion from any Catholic peer who voted in favor of equal marriage.

Tony Perkins was in the act yesterday with a lengthy piece on victims. Oh behold all the victims of equality. Apparently, because anti-discrimination ordinances prohibit a florist from discriminating against gays based on religion, gay couples should be denied equal protection under the law. We should not be allowed to marry because some florist doesn't approve.

Tony will probably claim (as others have) that the florist has gay employees. So because she complies with equal opportunity ordinances, she should be permitted to defy other anti-discrimination ordinances? Is this the "some of my best friends are gay" defense     or something else?

It goes on and on and on and on. Charisma News claimed yesterday that a baker is facing jail time for denying to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. I consider myself an accomplished home chef. I never thought of creaming sugar and butter in my KitchenAid mixer as a religious experience. Ugh. The theme that never dies is that same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy and incest. Sure. It's endless.

Robert Oscar Lopez

For their part, National Organization for Marriage (representing the Catholic Establishment) came up with Oscar Robert Lopez. This poor schmuck seems to suggest that he is an "ex-bi" (it all remains unclear). According to NOM, "Bobby's Story" is that Lopez is all fucked up because he was raised by a lesbian couple. Except that he wasn't raised by a lesbian couple. It's unclear when his father left his mother but "Bobby" seems to have been raised by a single mother who had a partner on the side (they did not share a residence). Lopez now claims that gay parenting is child abuse while NOM would like people to believe that there are thousands of people like Lopez (they have produced exactly one). Aside from the fact that Lopez was not raised by a gay couple, they sure as hell weren't married.

Wait. I got it. The reason that gays should not be permitted to marry is because an employee of NOM  was duped into sending someone NOM's unredacted tax return (which NOM blamed on the IRS) and Huffington Post and HRC published the result. Isn't that a perfect reason?

We all know what's missing!

Not one of these philosophers has cogently explained the harms of same-sex marriage. I hope to never read the word "complimentarity" again, but I know that I will. They desperately try to pass off the supposed harm of gay parenting as a reason to oppose same-sex marriage. Aside from the fact that it's irrelevant to the issue of marriage, gays make perfect parents. Now, apparently, because Justice Anthony Kennedy said that DOMA did not have a rational purpose, marriage equality is end of world. Go figure.

I know some of the positives of marriage equality. Marriage benefits gay couples and (as long as we are talking about kids) the children of gay couples. There is a societal benefit to allowing gay couples to marry.

What are the harms? All of these long winded flowery polemics (Ryan Anderson seems to write two per day) only serve to underscore the fact that they do not have a tangible, coherent argument. Yesterday, at Focus on the Family's blog:

The question has been asked “how does same-sex ‘marriage’ hurt anyone?” It’s one of those deceptive arguments designed to emphasize personal narrative over smart public policy and facts in the marriage debate. After all, if it doesn’t “hurt” anyone else, or keep anyone from living their heterosexual life, surely it can’t be wrong.

So it's not harmful? I am having a what-the-fuck moment. What is "deceptive" about asking for justification based on harm? As a society don't we weigh benefits in comparison to harms to arrive at "smart public policy?" What are these people saying? Turns out that their very lengthy diatribe describes the harm as the slippery slope to polygamy and incest. The reason that slippery slope arguments are baloney per se is because to not do "A" because of the slippery slope to "B" denies the fact that for every "A" there is at least one "B." We would never accomplish anything.

I could wait until the next ice age. I'm never going to get an intellectually honest answer about why these folks object to marriage equality. The reason is simple. These people have a religious objection and they are desperately trying to frame that religious objection as something other than what it is.