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Monday marks the start of legal gay marriage here in the Commonwealth, and the Times has an unintentionally hilarious article on it. Or maybe it's intentional--hard to know with these crafty New Yawkas.

May 16, 2004

Backers of Gay Marriage Ban Find Tepid Response in Pews
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Just four months after an alliance of conservative Christians was threatening a churchgoer revolt unless President Bush championed an amendment banning same-sex marriage, members say they have been surprised and disappointed by what they call a tepid response from the pews.

Most of the groups supporting the proposed federal constitutional amendment concede that it appears all but dead in Congress for this election year...

...opponents of gay marriage say they are puzzling over why such a volatile cultural issue is not spurring more rank-and-file conservative Christians to rise up in support of the amendment...

..."Our side is basically asleep right now," Matt Daniels, founder of the Alliance for Marriage, which helped draft the proposed amendment, said in an interview last week.

The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said: "I don't see any traction. The calls aren't coming in and I am not sure why."

Hmm, no response from the flock, eh? Might be a case of Americans sensing something is none of their business. That is a time-honored American tradition, after all.

The amendment's backers contend that the reason people are not responding more vocally is that many grass-roots conservatives do not yet understand how same-sex marriages affect them personally.

Um...actually, it kinda sounds like exactly the opposite; sounds like people understand just fine.

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who supports the amendment...said. "I think people are still having a hard time believing this is real. One of the most common responses I hear is, `This is just in Massachusetts, why does it concern us in other states?' "

Well, see, it does sound like people understand full well, doesn't it?

"When people understand that there are same-sex couples that will get married under Massachusetts law and then move to other states and demand that those marriages are recognized by the laws of other states, that is when people will understand this," he said.

Why? Won't they then just say, "This is someone else's marriage, why does it concern us?"

Mr. Foreman of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force [said] "The minute you pose the question to somebody, `How will this hurt you?,' they never have an answer."

Yeah, I've noticed that, too. Or at least that they never have an answer that doesn't sound a whole lot like a totalitarian excuse for sniffing around in other people's bedrooms. And speaking of that, have you noticed that when anti-gay activists try to justify condemning gay sex or gay marriage, they always have to do it by comparison to something patently illegal? They say, "Well, the State is allowed to look into people's bedrooms to stop rape, incest, and pedophilia, isn't it?" They have to do that because unless you put those criminal acts in people's mind in the same breath as gay sex, you're apt to have people realize that legislating gay sex or marriage is in fact sniffing around in the bedrooms of legal, consenting adults--including your neighbors--which most Americans rightly reject. As the tepid response to the gay-marriage ban amendment clearly shows.

But not everyone gets it.

Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention...has told President Bush's political adviser Karl Rove and members of Congress that no issue has upset ordinary evangelical Christians as much as the threat of gay marriage.

Dunno if we believe him. All evidence points to the contrary. Could the doctor be projecting his own views, or--worse--fibbing a bit?

Last week he stood by that view, but he acknowledged that parishioners around the country might not have voiced their opinions to elected officials as loudly as he had expected.

Ah. Well, there's nothing like a religious totalitarian for blind self-confirmation.