The Influence of the Orange Sky Spreads

An American columnist has actually started to defend the Church of the Orange Sky's previously declared position on the elimination of state supervision and authorization of marriage (here and here). Fuck the gay marriage debate, says Froma Harrop: we need a proper "marriage-neutral" government. Harrop also points out that the "traditional marriage" is already a minority of households in America, which I didn't know.

Unfortunately, most writers still don't seem to have grasped the concept. This writer, for example, is apparently upset that the California Supreme Court blew up the "reasonable middle ground compromise" position of non-marriage "civil unions" for gay people. The Boston Globe similarly adds that we should let the debate over civil rights be fought out in the democratic sphere rather than the judicial one.

Of course, if and when these white married writers see their own constitutional rights violated, I suspect you'll see them racing to the courthouse as fast as they can bring their well-paid lawyers to bear, but never mind that! We can "compromise" when it comes to civil rights for gays and lesbians - instead of "real" marriage, they can have second-class civil unions. I think we should make similar compromises on other rights - for example, many people think men should have the right to vote, but I think men shouldn't. I'm sure we can agree on the reasonable middle ground compromise that men can vote during an election, provided it's on a separate "civil plebiscite" ballot, which gets tallied separately and doesn't count towards the real election.

Doubtless if I were able to persuade a state government to pass such a law, legions of good moral anti-gay-marriage men would say, "No, we won't pursue our civil rights through the courts - civil rights are something to be settled democratically." They'd say that... wouldn't they?

As usual, commentators continue to insist that allowing gay marriage is inevitably going to pave the way for allowing polygamy, despite the fact that there is no logical basis for this position whatsoever.

Still, I think the most lunatic argument so far was recently advanced in the Los Angeles Times by a moron named Glen Lavy, who self-righteously seizes the opportunity to gratuitously beat up on bisexuals - a group, I should point out, whose failure to fit properly into either the "mainstream" or "peripheral" boxes tends to make them doubly marginalized. Lavy, who has obviously never befriended a bisexual (or at least realized he was doing so), claims that bisexual people are going to argue that they require polygamy in order to "fully satisfy" themselves - i.e. one same-sex spouse, and one opposite-sex spouse. Right.

It's interesting to see how desperate and pathetic the anti-gay-marriage front has become in the last few years. Their best arguments now can apparently be summed up as "Look! Evil polygamists!" If the California Supreme Court had accepted that argument when it was raised in 1948, inter-racial marriage would also still be illegal.