The more difficult part of the argument is the second half, because such truth-telling is verboten even in the conservative press. It goes something like this:
After years of arguments over Gay Marriage, those who support it have yet to adequately answer the question of why, if gay marriage is legalized, marriages cannot thenceforth constitute multiple people, or even relatives. Love is love, right? Furthermore, many mainstream Americans are not comfortable with the propensity of gay activists to sexualize everything. The Chick-fil-A gay “kiss in” — a protest against the fast food chain that involves gay people making out in public — is a perfect example. Whereas an earlier generation of activists may have just showed up with picket signs, today’s gay marriage advocates have to emphasize, in a tacky and public way, their sexuality. To many people this is a reminder of the kind of lack of self-control that led to the spread of diseases in the gay bathhouse culture of the 1970s. This is not to argue that homosexuality is a pathology; it’s possible that gay culture became so saturated with sex because the repression of the larger culture made gay people think about sex much more than they would have in a more accepting society. But logically the harping on sex is a contradiction: the gay marriage movement is both insisting that their sexuality is no big deal and not worth the freak-out by the “cis-genders,” yet at every turn, from “Will & Grace” to gay pride parades to the Chick-fil-A kiss-in, they emphasize their sexuality. Is it no big deal or is it everything?
It is entirely right and proper that Noah Michelson should take to The Huffington Post and argue from a position of reason that the Bible is full of strange rules about marriage and family. Yet when a conservative agrees to put the good book aside and also argue from human reason, he is called pathological, and a bigot and a hater. If he gets heard at all.
Mark Judge is the author of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock ‘n’ Roll.
