Many people ponder the questions as to where and how and when marriage equality opponents came up with their silly and ridiculous arguments against marriage equality. Well, in a legal context, those arguments cannot be based on animus against gay people and their/our relationships (they always are). One cannot go into court and just say that gay people are icky, although that is exactly what most anti-gay folks think and feel. So, anti-gay folks have to come up with more sophisticated, logical, and articulate reasons for their opposition or they can just cover up their true feelings with legalistic sounding gibberish. It appears they have chosen the latter since they cannot come up with anything else.
From slate.com:
As Yale Law Professor William N. Eskridge brilliantly argued two years ago, there’s really only one internally logical argument against gay rights: the idea that gay people deserve the state’s moral opprobrium. Yet this reasoning was functionally voided by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Romer v. Evans way back in 1996, when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that no law motivated primarily by animus against gays could pass constitutional muster. The animus test has its flaws, but it has largely succeeded in keeping baldly moralistic arguments—gay people are gross, or sinful, or sick—out of the courtroom.
Marriage-equality opponents, however, never quite got over the shock of seeing their most treasured argument foreclosed upon. If the state couldn’t justify anti-gay policies by insisting that it’s rational to dislike gays, what other argument could possibly suffice?
The puzzling hypothesis that legalizing gay marriage will lead straight people to have more kids out of wedlock? Judge Vaughn Walker raised this point with a lawyer defending California’s Proposition 8, demanding to know “how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects” straight people’s marriages. The lawyer had this response: “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”
The problem here, of course, is that an honest answer—“your honor, we believe gay people will destroy the marital institution altogether”—would undermine the supposedly secular, animus-free nature of these arguments. In developing them, anti-gay activists began with a conclusion—gay people don’t deserve the rights that we straight people have—then worked backward, camouflaging each prejudiced premise with a supposedly neutral talking point. Under any kind of scrutiny, these theories instantly fall apart, revealing their bigoted, constitutionally impermissible core.
And yet the inanity continues full-throttle, because gay marriage opponents have backed themselves into the corner they’ve always dreaded. They can’t give up their quest now—but they’re barred from citing the explanations that they truly believe, deep down, to be correct. The result is the current tailspin of idiocy, a shifting argument with rootless standards roaming from rationale to rationale in a desperate attempt to find shelter from the storm of progress swirling around it. It’s a pathetic display, but not an unpleasant one to witness. Stripped of all logic and reason, the argument against gay marriage has been reduced to gibberish. Enjoy the babbling while it lasts.
While I enjoy laughing at marriage equality opponents' arguments (silly as they are), I do wish that the wheels of justice would turn a bit more rapidly. On the other hand, those wheels are moving faster with this issue than any other that I have seen in my lifetime. So, I guess we should look for a little more patience and try to enjoy the ride.