The Year of Things Going Haywire

Some cultures, our own included, have been punctuated by the contributions of talented homosexuals, but the central dynamic of every healthy human society has always been robustly heterosexual. This must be true in every instance because same-sex coupling is a biological dead end. The crippling inability of homosexuals to connect emotionally with persons of their complementary gender renders them incapable of even a faltering half step toward a future generation without clinical intervention. Neither gay relationships nor gay culture is necessary for the maintenance of a healthy society. On the contrary, there is much about gay culture that is patently damaging to the moral matrix of any traditional society.

On Election Day of 2004, the adults of America were given opportunities to reaffirm the time-honored model of marriage, to confirm its very definition. Americans went to the polls in record numbers, determined to buttress their country’s traditional moral matrix. For gay radicals it was a day filled with disappointing ironies and unintended consequences. Before we take stock of the election results, let’s review the events that motivated so many average Americans to make their voices heard.

The Year of Things Going Haywire

The snappy team of homosexual litigators whose courtroom challenges had prompted a “civil union” accommodation in Vermont were disappointed. They had wanted nothing less than the full legitimizing power of a marriage privilege for the rag-tag band of same-sex-fixated paraphiliacs that calls itself the gay/lesbian/bisexual “community.” This oddball coalition desperately wanted respect, and they were in no mood to let social custom and the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of human experience stand in their way.

After Vermont, the gays with law degrees hunted about for another soft target, a state blessed with wistful Left-leaning utopian judges and also encumbered by a state constitution with procedural rules so complicated that the will of the people could not hope to keep pace with the edicts of philosopher-king jurists. Their perfect choice was Massachusetts.

On November 18th, 2003, after hearing arguments, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that homosexuals had a right to marry one another under that state’s constitution and it allowed the state legislature 180 days to make homosexual wedlock easy and commonplace. The justices, by a mere one-vote majority, imperiously demanded that the people’s elected representatives, many of whom are devoted Catholics, make haste to mainstream and legitimize homosexual behaviors. Legal experts immediately predicted that this ruling would have ramifications all across America. Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said that “it is inexcusable for this court to ‘fix’ its state constitution to make it comport with the pro-homosexual agenda of four court justices.”

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Martha B. Sosman wrote, “We have a pitched battle over who gets to use the ‘m’ word.” She noted that “same-sex couples who are civilly ‘united’ will have literally every single right, privilege, benefit and obligation of every sort that our state law confers on opposite-sex couples who are civilly ‘married’.”

This was not good enough for the four utopians on the court. “The dissimilitude between the terms ‘civil marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is not innocuous,” according to Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall. “It is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status.”

Indeed it does, and for good reason: homosexual unions are extraneous to the maintenance of a healthful social order; their peculiar behaviors and abnormal emotional focus are inimical to healthy child rearing. Because ninety-eight percent of children are born to fulfill a heterosexual destiny, virtually all gay custodians of children are depriving those children of the role-modeling that enriches the social wisdom of children in heterosexual homes. The children from gay households grow up deprived and confused, unless they are themselves congenitally gay.

Nonetheless, four Massachusetts justices were bent on burnishing their public image in the eyes of homosexuals. Their extreme ruling came in response to a request from the Massachusetts Senate asking the court whether a law giving same-sex couples the same rights and benefits of marriage, but calling their relationships civil unions, would satisfy constitutional requirements. It was a generous offer, but the court spurned it. Instead, the four prevailing judges chose to embrace the arguments of gay litigator Mary Bonauto; the court’s final judgment was little other than a thinly disguised paraphrase of Ms. Bonauto’s sentimental appeal to the court. The Massachusetts court’s 4-to-3 decision was the only one by any state supreme court to recognize a constitutional right to marriage for people in the grip of a same-sex fixation.

The decision ignited an uproar in the Massachusetts Legislature where lawmakers were scheduled to vote on an amendment to the state’s Constitution banning same-sex marriage. Due to complexities in the Massachusetts Constitution, any amendment could not be in place until November of 2006, because it would need to survive passage in two consecutive legislative sessions and then be approved by voters in a public referendum. All of this complexity had been factored into the radical gay-activist game plan to bamboozle America into accepting homosexual wedlock.

President Bush called the slim-margin Massachusetts ruling “deeply troubling.” He expressed his belief that, “Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”

The governor of Massachusetts agreed with the President of the United States. Governor Mitt Romney declared that “the people of Massachusetts should not be excluded from a decision as fundamental to our society as the definition of marriage.” The governor encouraged the development of a state constitutional amendment and a public referendum.

Media pundits correctly predicted that the Massachusetts ruling would catapult same-sex marriage into the heart of the 2004 presidential campaign. The Democrat candidates fell over one another to express their support for giving gay couples every benefit that traditional marriage confers, but they choked at expressing support for “gay marriage.” Then George Bush began to mimic the Democrats by trumpeting his approval of civil unions for homosexuals, which quickly wiped the luster from his purported belief in the sanctity of marriage. No one who truly believed in the sanctity of marriage would lend any support to the institutionalization of marriage-parody modalities called “civil unions.” By proposing such a dodge, crafty politicians are trying to have it both ways: they seek to placate homosexuals with the trappings of genuine marriage, while reserving the magical word “marriage” for heteros only. By indulging in this unprincipled con game George Bush has revealed himself as a shallow opportunist.

On March 29th, 2004 the Legislature passed a proposed amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution that would prohibit homosexual wedlock, but would legalize Vermont-style civil unions. This amendment must be approved again in the 2005-06 legislative session before it can be presented to the citizens of Massachusetts for ratification in November 2006. In this very Roman Catholic state the state’s Roman Catholic dioceses have sent letters to every parish urging Catholics to share with those elected representatives who did not vote to ban gay marriage their “profound disappointment.”

The proposed amendment specifies that same-sex couples joined in civil unions will receive “entirely the same benefits, protections, rights, privileges and obligations as are afforded to married persons,” which is nothing less than a giant step toward legitimizing the very sort of behaviors that are inimical to the healthful continuance of traditional marriage. Any society that cared a whit about its own preservation would do everything legally possible to discourage any upstart imitations of traditional marriage. It was just this sort of experimentation that ruined the institution of marriage in Scandinavia. What gays really want is to be completely accepted as the moral and functional equivalent of heterosexuals, including straight parents. Sadly for them, a swelling body of evidence demonstrates that most gay couples have no interest in parenting and have little potential for being robust role models for the heterosexual children in their custody.

According to a New York Times article dated March 29, 2004, “Much of the support for the amendment was decidedly lukewarm Monday, if that. ‘This amendment stinks,’ said Representative James H. Fagan, a Democrat, who said he would vote yes even though he would prefer that the amendment only ban gay marriage. ‘But at least it gives the people a chance to vote for something. It’s a lousy amendment’.”

He is right; it stinks to high heaven. Representative Manuel de Macedo, a Republican, argued that bundling the gay-marriage ban with a glowing approval of gay civil unions was tantamount to saying that “you can vote for John Kerry, but you’ve got to vote for George Bush at the same time.” “Is that honest?” he asked. “You know it’s not.”

He’s correct. If the legitimization of homosexual wedlock is bad for our social enterprise, then homosexual wedlock by any other name is also hostile to the best interests of our society.

There were seventy-five supporters of homosexual marriage in the Massachusetts Legislature; they all knew that they hadn’t enough votes to have their way, so they employed a strategic gambit of repeatedly voting for the amendment as it advanced through preliminary voting as a way of keeping more conservative amendment proposals from being considered. Then, when the final vote came, the crowd of gay-marriage supporters popped up to aggressively denounce the weaker amendment they had all promoted.

“Please do not amend the world’s oldest constitution to take civil rights away from people,” pleaded Representative Matthew C. Patrick. What civil rights was he referring to? No legislature in human history had ever granted hairy homosexual males a civil right to marry and adopt children and pretend to be the functional and moral equivalent of a bride and groom.

On May 17, 2004, with a constitutional amendment still two years away, homosexual wedlock became legal by judicial dictate in the very Catholic state of Massachusetts.

Typical of the intellects that opposed the amendment banning homosexual wedlock is Representative Kath-Anne Reinstein, an enthusiastic Democrat Party cheerleader for the gay agenda. According to Ms. Reinstein, “I feel that we should only amend the constitution when we add rights to individuals.” But the amendment did add rights; it granted gays all the benefits of traditional marriage; it simply denied them the opportunity to call their couplings marriages. That’s what really has this liberal cranked: gays might be denied their true objective, total legitimization. Ms. Reinstein is dismayed because a tiny counterculture that glories in anal erotism, sado-masochism, inter-generational seduction, and fetishism of every sort, a sub-culture with a plummeting life expectancy, rampant sexually transmitted disease, a sky-rocketing rate of drug abuse, a 25% rate of alcoholism and a demonstrated inability to form loving commitments to persons of their complementary gender, is being denied the “right” to present itself to the host culture as a lifestyle that is “just as good” as traditional heterosexual family life.

Ms. Reinstein should be reminded that homosexual wedlock has never been considered a right in our culture because it lies beyond the definition of marriage in our culture. The definition of marriage requires that the marrying couple be of complementary genders. This has not stopped millions of homosexuals from marrying, therefore gays are not denied the right to marry, they are simply denied the opportunity to have a same-gender coupling recognized by society as a legitimate marriage. Most gays see even gay marriage as a bourgeois institution that is just not fun; they’d sooner dress in lime-green polyester leisure suits than be caught dead in a marriage. What they really want is a big seal of approval from a host culture which continues to scrutinize the gay counterculture with suspicion.

Representative Reinstein then stretched her intellectual powers to their elastic limit and blurted out, “I also feel, who cares? Who cares if they should get married? Who am I to tell two law-abiding and consenting adults who they can and cannot love and who they elect to spend the rest of their lives with?”

Is she nuts? Gays are free to love whomever they choose and for as long as they wish. But the answer to her question “Who cares if they get married?”, is “Everyone” because the recognition of homosexual wedlock and its attendant legitimization of homosexual behaviors would impair the functioning of the matrix of interdependent social institutions that undergird our civilization. The personal relationships of homosexuals have always been extraneous to the enterprise of civilization building, that’s why there has never been a need for any society to recognize gay relationships. The last thing any healthy civilization needs is to have the mission of its churches, its schools, its military and its childrearing families muddled by gay perspectives, gay manners and gay emotional needs.

The 4-to-3 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to invent a homosexual wedlock privilege was bitterly divisive; the sparring between the justices was characterized by an air of imperious condescension by the majority justices toward the dissenters. The dissenters, in turn, accused the majority justices of uncritical acceptance of the radical gay social agenda. The usual collegiality and respectful tone of the Massachusetts high court unraveled under the stress of deciding if homosexuals had a right to marry in that state.

The majority opinion was brusquely dismissive of Justice Martha B. Sosman’s dissenting argument that civil unions would give homosexuals all the benefits of marriage, except for the name marriage. She had quoted Shakespeare’s line “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,” to which the majority had responded that Justice Sosman’s argument “so clearly misses the point that further discussion appears to be useless.” Justice Sosman accused the majority of being “activist” and said their opinion “merely repeats the impassioned rhetoric” of the radical gay litigators, which it did almost word for word.

Once the court had slammed the door on civil unions as an alternative to marriage, the Legislature began a marathon of constitutional conventions punctuated by emotional oratory, filibustering and back-room bargaining. Finally, in March, the Legislature approved a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage in Massachusetts, but would permit civil unions for gays.

Governor Mitt Romney and other opponents of gay marriage sought to delay gay marriages until after the public referendum on the constitutional amendment. A final attempt was a federal lawsuit that was heard by an appellate court on June 17, 2004.

Despite these efforts, gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004. From that day forward both the opponents and the proponents of gay marriage braced for the inevitable political and legal battles over gay marriage. The gay marriage issue became a powerful motivating force in the 2004 presidential and congressional campaigns. The advocates in Massachusetts began preparing for the next round in the constitutional amendment process.

The governor instructed the state’s justices of the peace to do their legally required duty even if it meant holding their noses. Twelve of the state’s justices resigned rather than violate their moral principles. According to the New York Times, “For every euphoric same-sex couple anticipating marriage in this heavily Catholic state, there are counterparts like Linda Kelly, who resigned as a state-appointed justice of the peace in Charlton, saying she had moral and religious objections to performing same-sex weddings. “ ‘If I’m going to say I’m a Catholic, I’d better walk the talk and not follow along with this,’ Ms. Kelly said.”

Not so J. Mary Sorrell who had become a justice of the peace only ninety days before just so she could solemnize gay marriages. Ms. Sorrell arrived at the city clerk’s office at 5 A.M. in the gay-friendly college town of Northhampton to accommodate expected gay patrons. She declared, “I am a lesbian and I wanted to make sure that there was a visible member of our community who was not merely willing to solemnize same-sex marriages, but who was excited as a member of the tribe.”

The struggle had already galvanized the pastors of Massachusetts, drawing some into the swirl of politics for the first time and forging new alliances between white conservatives and black and Hispanic pastors. Trinity Evangelical Church in North Redding had participated in political rallies and letter-writing campaigns. Its pastor, the Reverend George Ray reflected on the eve of gay marriage in Massachusetts that “Tonight, after midnight, things change here in Massachusetts because we become the first state to recognize gay marriages. We have done it in the name of being sophisticated human beings, but, really, we have been extraordinarily naïve.”

Roberto Miranda, pastor of the Lion of Judah, a largely Hispanic church, said he worried that the advent of gay marriage would “desensitize” people to homosexuality. But making homosexuality seem normal was always a hoped-for consequence of gay marriage, especially by those radical activists who privately shunned and denigrated marriage as a bourgeois “straight-people’s thing.”

“It will do harm,” said Pastor Miranda. “It gives people the message that homosexuality is O.K. As people become exposed to homosexuality through the news, through television, through the movies, they become used to it.” Without knowing it, he is describing the stated stratagem of queer theorists Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill to “Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible,” which they articulated in their 1987 essay The Overhauling of Straight America. Only by first desensitizing the common folk to the jolting queerness of homosexuality can gay radicals hope to achieve the remainder of their social agenda.

On the theory that “marketing” homosexuality to school children will transform the attitudes of future voters, queer theorist Paul Rondeau explained that an excellent method to “convert” heterosexual children to acceptance of homosexual behaviors was to wear society down with an unending avalanche of gay-friendly propaganda “to the point where just accepting homosexuality is much less of a burden than continuing to fight it…Whoever captures the kids owns the future.”

The Governor Takes a Stand

The governor of Massachusetts is a plain-spoken man. Governor Romney made clear that “Massachusetts should not become the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage. We do not intend to export our marriage confusion to the entire nation.” The governor sought to quarantine the first-ever institutionalization of buggery to within his state’s borders by invoking a 48-word 1913 law that Massachusetts will not marry any out-of-state couple whose marriage would be “void” in their home state. Governor Romney declared that Massachusetts would enforce this law and revise the marriage license forms to require evidence that the applying couple intended to live in a state that now recognized homosexual wedlock as a legal institution. Gay radicals immediately tried to misrepresent the 1913 law as legal relic once used to discourage mixed-race marriages, but as Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly deftly pointed out, the Massachusetts Legislature had cast aside the Commonwealth’s ban on interracial marriage way back in 1843, almost a generation before the start of the Civil War.

As the governor explained, “Our current laws, as they exist, limit same-sex marriage to people from jurisdictions where such marriage would be legal. And our understanding is that same-sex marriage is only legal in Massachusetts. And therefore, by definition, only people who reside in Massachusetts would be able to be married under this provision.” This was a clear recitation of black-letter law. Thirty-nine states had already passed into law defense-of-marriage acts that limited a lawful marriage to one man and one woman. Three other states – Maryland, New Hampshire and Wyoming – had laws precluding same-sex marriage.

Three liberal Democrat state legislators sponsored a bill to repeal the 1913 law. They echoed lesbian litigator Mary Bonauto, who called the law discriminatory. She glossed over the point that laws are socially useful because they make discriminating judgments between what is good for society and what is harmful. The 1913 law currently makes a discriminating judgment against the nation-wide proliferation of New Age social novelties, such as mono-sex marriage.

The new Massachusetts marriage license forms have cast aside the words “bride” and “groom” and replaced them with the sterile legalese of “Party A” and “Party B .” The form includes a new question about whether those applying were ever joined in a civil union or domestic partnership anywhere, and if so, whether those unions were legally dissolved. The governor said that his legal team was exploring whether a couple could marry if one of the applicants was joined in a non-marriage legal partnership with a third party (Party C?). The governor explained that without this provision a gay partner could duck all alimony and child support obligations simply by claiming that the marriage was null and void from its inception. The application also explains to out-of-state couples that if they do not intend to move to Massachusetts, then their marriage “shall be null and void.” This last provision would mean that other states would be foolish to recognize Massachusetts gay marriages because those marriages were null and void from inception by virtue of the gay couples’ false declaration of intent to reside in Massachusetts.

The Insurrection Begins

No sooner had the governor issued the order to enforce the law as it was written than small-town utopians began to flout it. Community clerks in Somerville, Worcester, and ever-so-gay Provincetown began accepting applications from out-of-state couples who had no intention of living in Massachusetts. Their lawless spirit quickly spread to far away places.

San Francisco

The city of San Francisco had a spanking new mayor and the youngest mayor in more than a century. Gavin Newsom stood six feet two and had, as a writer for the New Yorker put it, the “slicked-back hair of a silent-screen actor.” He had the perfect photo-prop wife, a former lingerie model turned television commentator. Newsom craved the white-hot spotlight. In his brief tenure he has been featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes, he has chatted twice with Charlie Rose, and Newsweek has touted him as one of the Democratic Party’s five rising stars. The upscale Harper’s Bazaar did an eight-page gush piece and photo spread of Newsom and his wife, calling then “the new Kennedys.” No doubt Mr. Newsom, who has been known to play tape recorded Robert Kennedy speeches for his friends, was flattered by the comparison. Robert Kennedy was a Newsom boyhood hero; just like Newsom, Kennedy was a wealthy Irish Catholic. Newsom is a millionaire who owns a winery, clothing boutiques and a resort hotel, all of which were built with financial assistance from Gordon Getty, a billionaire heir to the John Paul Getty oil fortune.

Gavin Newsom’s mentors include Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, who has invested in his businesses. Other mentors are California senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbra Boxer. Tom Ammiano, one of Newsom’s opponents in the mayoral race, called Newsom “a thirty-six-year-old golden boy with Getty money.”

The mayoral race had begun with nine contenders. Newsom, a Democrat, finally won the office after a runoff election in which he barely beat a Green Party candidate whom he wildly outspent. City Supervisor Tom Ammiano reflected that “There are large ambitions here – the Gettys, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein: they’re thinking, President Newsom.”

When Gordon Getty was asked if he imagines a Newsom presidency, he responded “Of course.” When Nancy Pelosi was asked the same question she answered, “I certainly do,” adding “He’s a very beautiful, lovely person.” (“Going Places”, The New Yorker, 10/4/04)

None of Gavin Newsom’s mayoral-race position papers gave the voters even a hint that he would become a fire-breathing proponent of the radical homosexual agenda soon after he took his oath of office. Gays on his staff had argued against such a transformation, pointing out that both his local and national supporters would feel betrayed and embarrassed in an election year. According to The New Yorker, Pelosi told Newsom that Democrats had been working for more than two years on derailing the constitutional amendment to defend the traditional definition of marriage, “and we don’t want outside interventions that could change the dynamic.”

Mayor Newsom flipped caution to the wind. He and his aides carefully selected two ancient and photogenic lesbians to be the first couple married at City Hall, on February 12th, 2004. A photo of the “spouses for life” was splashed across the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and was quickly shared with all of America. Peter Ragone, Newsom’s press secretary, explained the careful choice of the quaint lesbians this way: “We wanted it to be about the people, not let it be the usual ‘B roll’ of two gay men in the Castro with their hands in each other’s chaps.” Mayor Newsom pressed his filmmaker brother-in-law to document staff meetings for the promotion of homosexual wedlock. It is scheduled for release in 2005. Some Democrats felt that Newsom had made a shrewd move to “win back the left.” The executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights praised Newsom for being “spectacularly bold.”

Not everyone was pleased. In short order this self-appointed patron saint of homosexual wedlock had garnered fourteen hundred death threats. His security detail more than doubled. A public opinion poll revealed that Newsom had the highest name recognition of any potential candidate for the 2006 California governor’s race, but one of every four Democrats had a negative opinion of him. Said the visionary mayor, “To my base of support, it was just a hand grenade.” Local pastors forbade Newsome to attend services at their churches. He received boos at the Saint Patrick’s Day lunch. At the Democratic Party convention in Boston every sort of local yokel was allowed to address the delegates – everyone except Gavin Newsom.

Perhaps Newsom had no clue about what a genuine marriage was. His own parents had separated when he was only two years old. Newsom’s female aide Joyce Newstat says of him that “he prefers to surround himself with powerful women, as opposed to men.” This aversion is not indicative of a mature masculine psyche; in this he resembles Bill Clinton, who also had a dynamic mother and no mature masculine role model. It was totally lost on Newsom that his promotion of lesbian households would condemn every boy child raised in such households to replicate Newsom’s own shaky grasp of masculine basics. But he was a good poseur, with his slicked-back hair and his lingerie-model photo-op-prop wife. The homosexuals loved him.

It’s Crime Time!

The California Constitution states in clear black-letter law that marriage is defined as “a personal relation arising out of a civil contract between a man and a woman.” If that weren’t enough, the voters of California had approved Proposition 22, a ballot measure in 2000 that defined marriage as a heterosexual social institution.

Nonetheless, Mayor Newsom ordered the City Hall staff to commence issuing worthless marriage licenses to people with same-sex fixations. New license forms were printed that replaced the words “bride” and “groom” with the sterile “1st applicant” and “2nd applicant.”

Homosexuals flocked to San Francisco from as far away as Europe. Long lines formed at City Hall. The staff began churning out gay marriage parodies like link sausages, squeezing out 825 sham weddings on February 16th alone, which brought the total as of that date to 2,425. Every couple was milked for $83 for a souvenir marriage license that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Mayor Newsom seemed to be saying to gays that if our republic wouldn’t give gays what they wanted, then what good was our republic. City and county officials acknowledged that the state’s family law forbade same-sex marriage, but they were determined to issue the eighty-three-dollar licenses anyway. According to the New York Times, “Legal experts said the new licenses held only symbolic value because California law defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.”

The New York Times (2/17/04) painted this picture: “Inside City Hall, staff members had set up an assembly line to process the licenses, in part by revamping computer programs intended to deal with property assessments. Couples wend from lines for marriage applications, to lines for officials to proofread the documents to lines to shuffle people through civil ceremonies.” Then a volunteer cranked out a copy of their sham license before the “newlyweds” scampered off. An Associated Press report said that each gay was declared a “spouse for life” “in brief vows that have given San Francisco’s seat of government the feel of a Las Vegas wedding chapel.” (AP 2/15/04)

Not content to flout the democratic process, San Francisco’s City Attorney Dennis Herrera, filed a lawsuit against the state “to ensure the constitutionality of same-sex marriage in California.” The lawsuit assured that the matter would reach the California Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Mayor Newsom invited the newly “married” homosexuals to a wine reception at City Hall. Matthew D. Staver, president of Liberty Council, predicted that the celebration would be short lived. Observed Mr. Staver, “The mayor has no more authority to issue same-sex marriage licenses than he has to issue pilot’s licenses.”

In a New York Times article titled “Gay Marriage Licenses Create a Quandry for the Clergy” (3/6/04) we are told that many of the homosexuals who were led to believe that they had been legally married at San Francisco’s City Hall were now flocking to a church or synagogue for a secondary ceremony. Said the Times, “…there is also a deeply political undercurrent to the religious weddings that is creating divisions in some institutions [religious communities], even those with a history of blessing gay and lesbian partnerships.” In other words, some naïve congregations of good-hearted Christians and Jews, who once sought to welcome gays, were discovering that the radical gay agenda these gays embraced was now a threat to cherished notions of marriage and childrearing.

The Times observed that “By getting married with a license in a church or synagogue, many couples are hoping to chip away at opposition to same-sex marriages among religious people, and thereby advance the broader goals of the gay rights movement.” So gay marriage is a stalking horse for a far more radical social transformation. Politically savvy gays are using gullible Christians and Jews as stepping stones to a future gay utopia where gay perspectives will push traditional perspectives into the shadows.

Driving the point home, the New York Times tells us that “The new marriage licenses in San Francisco are giving gay and lesbian couples here an unprecedented platform to push their cause among congregations that have accepted gay relationships in the past.”

This is the gay agenda of queer theorists Kirk and Pill playing itself out as street theater: find a soft church to target, then gain its sympathy, then exploit that sympathy to promote the acceptance of countercultural values.

The New York Times informs us that “One of the most difficult questions facing some clergy members is whether to sign the licenses of the gay and lesbian couples. That would amount to an acknowledgment that the marriages are of equal standing with opposite-sex marriages.”

In some congregations that had permitted same-sex blessings, reluctant members had been tolerant of the practice only because these blessings were clearly not marriages. Now these members were having gay marriages force fed to them causing, as the Times put it, “widespread confusion, and anxiety, about how to handle them [gay marriages].” Here we see the activist tactic of incrementalism at work; this is a perfect example of the queer-theorist prescription to “muddy the moral waters.” If they can’t force their way into civilization’s vital institutions with the battering ram of judicial decrees, then they will gnaw relentlessly at the foundations of our traditional moral matrix until society’s weakening defenses collapse.

Maurice Healy, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco, said, “There is a good deal of concern among Catholics and other religious people in this city. The church has had the same view of homosexuality for 2,000 years, and I don’t think a smash-and-grab play by Mayor Newsom is going to change that.”

The Rev. Dr. Karen Oliveto, who performed eight same-sex marriage ceremonies at City Hall and another in her church, was called before a bishop and accused of “disobedience to the order and discipline of the United Methodist Church.” She could face a trial and the loss of her pastoral license.

In Los Angeles, the Rev. Troy D. Perry, founder of the predominantly gay Metropolitan Community Churches, urged the 46,000 claimed members of his church to seek marriage licenses in 120 cities across America on Valentine’s Day. Officials of this church said that thousands of “action kits” on participation had been distributed. Jim Birkitt, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles, said his fellowship had performed about 6,000 same-sex marriages a year, in L.A. and elsewhere. “These marriages are recognized by God,” said Birkitt, “but not by the government.”

Mayor Gavin Newsom had rushed to begin the gay-marriage carnival to get out ahead of the Campaign for California Families, a group that had announced it would file a lawsuit against the city and county to block the issuance of marriage licenses to homosexual couples. The city clerk said she had not expected to act on the mayor’s request until a week later.

So despite the fact that California family law clearly states that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California,” Mayor Newsom set in motion a parade of gay parody marriages that sent televised images of gay male “newlyweds” soul kissing at City Hall into every home in America. Before it was ended by court order, almost 4,000 same-sex couples had been cranked through the San Francisco City Hall faux-marriage mill.

The Marriage Mill Grinds to a Halt

In mid-August the California Supreme Court finally ruled that the blitz of same-sex marriages that were pumped out in February and March of 2004 were “void and of no legal effect from their inception.” In a unanimous decision the justices said that Mayor Newsom had exceeded his authority. By a 5-to-2 vote the court devalued the more-than 4,000 marriage licenses purchased by gay couples to mere collector’s items. City officials were ordered to remove any trace of them from the city’s records.

The 114-page ruling said, in part, that “Withholding or delaying a ruling on the current validity of the existing same-sex marriages might lead numerous persons to make fundamental changes in their lives or otherwise proceed on the basis of erroneous expectations, creating potentially irreparable harm.”

Furthermore, the Supreme Court justices said that Mayor Newsom had invited chaos by overstepping his authority: “This conclusion is consistent with the classic understanding of the separation of powers doctrine – that the legislative power is the power to enact statutes, the executive power is the power to execute or enforce statutes, and the judicial power is the power to interpret statutes and to determine their constitutionality,” said Chief Justice George wrote.

“There are thousands of elected and appointed public officials in California’s 58 counties charged with the ministerial duty of enforcing thousands of state statutes. If each official were empowered to decide whether or not to carry out each ministerial act based upon the official’s own personal judgment of the constitutionality of an underlying statute, the enforcement of statutes would become haphazard, leading to confusion and chaos.”

Mayor Newsom offered no apology. He said he was convinced that gay-marriage advocates would achieve victory in his lifetime. He was right about one thing: the big struggle over gay marriage lay in the future; the California Supreme Court ruling expressly sidestepped the question of whether the ban on gay marriage was constitutional in California. That issue is at the heart of another lawsuit that may take years to wend its way to the California Supreme Court. Some of the justices had worried aloud that Mayor Newsom’s bad example, if allowed to stand, would invite further flouting of the law by other local officials. Their concerns were well founded. The mayor’s misbehavior quickly became a blueprint for crackpots across America.

Enter the Puppet Master

On Friday, February 27th, 2004, Jason West, age 26, became the first elected official in New York State to solemnize a homosexual marriage. Then he solemnized two dozen more. Mr. West is a sometime house painter and puppeteer-for-hire who was elected mayor of the 6,000-citizen hamlet of New Paltz as the Green Party candidate. Most of his voter base was students attending the nearby State University of New York; he used a clown on stilts and helpers dressed in a chicken suit to goad young voters toward the polls. He exploited the fact that the townsfolk divided their votes between a sixteen-year incumbent mayor and a long-serving village trustee. Jason West won office by only 64 votes out of 869 cast.

Mr. West presided over the gay marriages wearing the only tie he owns and a $120 suit from J.C.Penny. He said that he had been a proponent of homosexual wedlock for years prior to his election campaign, during which he was silent on the subject. Referring to his two previous runs for the State Assembly, in which he had mentioned his support of gay marriage, Mr. West recalled, “I lost by a landslide.”

He said he had been inspired by events in Massachusetts. Soon after his parking-lot ceremonies, hundreds of gay couples from across the country clamored to be on the mayor’s waiting list. He was mobbed like a rock star during a visit to The Wave, a gay club, where the mayor was pulled on stage by a drag queen in a red dress.

In defiance of Governor Pataki’s insistence that marriage in New York was strictly a heterosexual affair, Jason West vowed to continue performing sham ceremonies. Mr. West declared: “I urge other mayors to start solemnizing these things.”

With no supporting evidence whatsoever, the media declared the upstart mayor of New Paltz “a heterosexual.” The liberal New York Times published a gush piece on the callow kid from New Paltz in its prestigious magazine section on March 4th, 2004. According to the Times the first questions the young mayor asked his new village attorney were about the beaver-trapping laws and whether a mayor could sanctify the union of homosexuals. He was told that the black-letter law was unclear “because the laws were written around the late 19th Century, and no one ever conceived of wanting to do this then,” said Spencer McLaughlin, West’s public attorney. Mr. McLaughlin had explained to Mayor West in a lengthy memo “why you can’t perform same-sex marriage…” But young Mr. West threw caution to the wind.

The New York Times captured the essence of Jason West in these words: “…asking Jason West if he has thought about gay marriage is like asking him if he has thought about renewable energy sources or the evils of global capitalism, ‘This is what gets me,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been for gay marriage’.” According to the Times, “…when the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided in favor of gay marriage, and then a week later, gay marriages were performed in San Francisco, and then President Bush broached the idea of a constitutional ban against gay marriage, West realized he ‘had to speed things up’.” Of course he did, for he imagined himself to be in the visionary vanguard of a New Age utopian movement.

West brainstormed with gay activist Gale McGovern; then he called the American Civil Liberties Union. “He said, ‘Hi, this is Jason West and I am the mayor of New Paltz and I want to perform gay marriages,” is how an ACLU lawyer remembered the call.

West kept his intentions a secret from the town board; he privately faxed out a news release announcing his intention to begin marrying homosexual couples. Robert Hebel, a non-Green-Party village trustee sought to have West removed from office for using taxpayer dollars to fund illegal gay activism and for circumventing the town board. One of Jason West’s “advisers” suggested that he marry whole crowds of homosexuals all at once to suddenly establish a legal precedent before he could be arrested.

West himself has never been married. Reporters have declared him “straight” on no evidence whatsoever. His parents divorced when he was young; he shuttled between their households. To quote his sister, “It just makes it really true when he says marriage is something that is just between two people and not about anyone else.” She’s a fool; marriage is not “just between two people,” it is an institution that shapes the character of our society one citizen at a time; marriage has social consequences.

Jason West said he would defy any challenge to the gay weddings he had performed. “I am willing to go to jail to hold these marriages,” he declared. But when he was finally challenged by New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer to knock off his illegal behavior, Jason West meekly complied. The marriage mill he had set up in a parking lot was carried on by two lesbian Unitarian ministers.

Asbury Park

The spirit of frisky lawlessness soon spread to Asbury Park, New Jersey. On Tuesday March 9th, 2004, D. Kiki Tomek, the deputy city clerk of Asbury Park became the first person in New Jersey to accept a marriage license from a homosexual couple. Ms. Tomek declined to give her age, though she offered that she had come of age in the ‘60s. She said her town’s changing demographic, and teasing by her homosexual friends, prompted her to begin accepting marriage licenses from gays. After she received a letter from the state attorney general warning her that she faced legal action, Ms. Tomek defiantly declared that nothing short of a court order would make her stop.

On Monday, March 8th, 2004, Asbury Park’s deputy mayor performed New Jersey’s first “government sanctioned” homosexual wedlock ceremony. Mayor Kevin Sanders had declined the honor. The grinning gay couple, two males in their 40s, owns an antiques shop in Asbury Park. They planned a honeymoon in Philadelphia. (Huh?) Asked how he concluded the ceremony, Jim Bruno said, “I pronounced them…married.” New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey said he would go to court to get an injunction to stop renegade office holders from dispensing marriage licenses to homosexuals.

Said the Newark Star Ledger, “Asbury Park’s decision to marry gay couples thrusts the community onto the same stage as San Francisco, New Paltz, and Portland, Oregon…” Things were heating up in little Asbury Park. The Star Ledger called the sea-side town “something of a gay mecca in New Jersey.” According to the Ledger, “Gays have played a huge role in the renaissance of the faded Shore town, renovating houses and taking an active role in local politics. According to the 2000 Census, about 3 percent of all couples who live in the city of 17,000 people are gay.”

Let’s unpack this statement: if the entire population of 17,000 were divided into families-of-four then there could be no more than 4,000 straight couples in Asbury Park. Three percent of 4,000 is only 120. So the Ledger is talking about roughly 240 gay people out of a population of 17,000 who have entered an impoverished town and used their swollen bank accounts and their gay-identity-group cohesion to wrest control of the local government and use it as a tool to further a radical homosexual social agenda; this is what the liberal Star Ledger calls “taking an active role in local politics.” To some of the old timers the gay “renaissance” looks more like a coup d’tat. Their town, and their control of its moral atmosphere, has been snatched away from them. Asbury Park has undergone a radical moral re-zoning.

At the mono-sex nuptials, outspoken gay Councilman John Loffredo read a statement that encapsulated the full intellectual firepower of the Asbury Park executive branch: “The city is aware that state law does not yet officially authorize same-sex marriages, yet state law does not expressly prohibit same-sex marriages, either.”

That’s sooooo true! And neither did New Jersey law expressly prohibit wedlock between a human and a Rocky Mountain horned sheep. For some reason the state’s legislators neglected to spell out that particular prohibition in excruciating detail. Nor did they explicitly prohibit the millions of possible kinky, weird, perverted, degrading, and socially useless couplings that might suggest themselves to more fevered imaginations. The elected legislators were normal people who had been elected by other normal people with the tacit understanding that they would enact legislation for the healthful continuance of our civilization. For them to pursue any other goal would be a formula for social dis-integration and the death of a cohesive common culture.

New Jersey’s attorney general was plain spoken about the gay-marriage-parody mill in Asbury Park: “It is really unfair to same-sex couples. They are coming out of municipal buildings and courthouses having been sold a dream,” he said. “Essentially, the official is issuing a worthless certificate. It’s the same as if he issued a marriage certificate to two twelve-year-old kids who pretended to be married.”

Nonetheless, the Newark Star Ledger gushed about how the middle-aged gay guys “celebrated their marriage at Georgie’s, a gay bar in the city…” One thrilled “spouse”, Louis Navarrette, bubbled “My mother brought me here from Cuba so I could have a better life, and this is part of it.”

Star Ledger staff writer Tom Feeney wrote (4/22/04, p.30) “Like New Paltz, N.Y., and San Francisco, Asbury Park began challenging long-held assumptions about state laws by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.” This is more nonsense. These were not “long-held assumptions,” but an ancient, culturally rooted, definition of marriage as a complementary relationship between a man and a woman. The other genders, gay and lesbian, are simply pretenders to a vital social institution that is best preserved by excluding them, by holding their gay notions of childrearing, and their negative gay critiques of heterosexual relationships, at arm’s length.

On March 9th, 2004, the attorney general of New Jersey warned Asbury Park officials that they were eligible for prosecution for performing sham marriages. The mayor knuckled under at once: “We will not put our community in financial peril or our deputy city clerk at risk of violating the law,” said Mayor Kevin Sanders. Homosexual councilman Loffredo jumped in to say that all legal bills would be paid by gays and the heavily-funded gay-activist group Lambda Legal Defense Fund. So the hidden hand of high-roller gay radicals was once again moving to shape the future of marriage in America.

New Jersey law is clear. To quote David Buckel, a lawyer for Lambda Legal: “New Jersey law does not allow the issuance of licenses to same-sex couples.” The statutes use the clearly understood words “husband and wife” and “bride and groom.”

On November 5th, 2004, Judge Linda Feinberg of Superior Court in Trenton held that the issue of gay marriage was a matter for the Legislature to decide. The matter was then bumped up to the Appellate Division, leaving open the possibility that New Jersey’s notoriously liberal Supreme Court might invent a gay marriage privilege.

Meanwhile…On the Left Coast

In short order, pandering politicians were breaking out in an infectious rash of pro-gay activism. An Associated Press report said of Seattle that “This left-leaning city joined the gay marriage fight yesterday, with the mayor announcing that City Hall will recognize unions of gay city employees who tie the knot elsewhere… Mayor Greg Nickels issued an executive order requiring the city to recognize same-sex marriages… Meanwhile, six same-sex couples who applied for marriage licenses at the King County Administration Building were rejected because state law defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman. But King County Administrator Ron Sims invited couples to sue him, explaining that he supported the couples’ efforts…”

Only five days earlier (3/4/04) the Associated Press had issued a report from Portland, Oregon that said “A new front in the battle over same-sex marriage opened yesterday in Portland,…Officials issued hundreds of licenses yesterday to same-sex couples, many of whom quickly exchanged vows in ceremonies organized by a gay-rights group at a Portland hotel and a city auditorium.”

Benton County Brides Sing the Blues

After agreeing to dispense marriage licenses to homosexuals, the three commissioners of Benton County, Oregon decided instead to withhold marriage licenses from everyone. They taped a public notice on the courthouse door that read: “Benton County will no longer issue marriage licenses regardless of sexual orientation.”

Linda Modrell, chairwoman of the three-member county commission, expressed her feelings this way: “For me this doesn’t have to do with gay marriage at all. It has to do with equal treatment.” She feels that the gender-specific part of the definition of marriage is a mistreatment of homosexuals. By her logic, the number-specific part of the definition of marriage must also be a mistreatment of polygamists and polyandrists.

When anxious brides-to-be called the Benton County clerk’s office to ask if the prohibition meant they couldn’t get married, they were told to seek a license in Linn County, twelve miles away. The future brides had also been calling the Linn County clerk to ask if he too had plans to deny them a marriage license. They were told absolutely not. The Linn County clerk called his Benton County counterparts “childish.”

The Benton County troika began receiving nasty e-mails. There was talk of a recall vote for chairwoman Modrell. The national group Pflag – Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays – sent the commissioners a bouquet. The commissioners testily announced that there was nothing in the law that required them to issue marriage licenses to anyone.

Raymond Cihak, a local lawyer representing the Defense of Marriage Coalition, declared: “Oregon has licensed heterosexual couples that have desired to marry. I don’t understand why they’d reverse 150 years of history based on one public hearing. It’s just embarrassing.”

The inconvenience of traveling twelve miles is not so great, but the significance of getting a marriage license in Benton County was big for some brides. “This is my home,” said Kathy Cauthorn. “It wouldn’t have occurred to me to go anywhere else.” She said of the showboating policy of the three commissioners, “It’s not a non-discrimination policy; it’s a full-discrimination policy.”

According to the New York Times (3/27/04, p.A8), gays were gleeful and celebrating their being denied marriage licenses. “We are still equal if no one else can get a license,” chirped lesbian Carolyn Bales.

About this same time, officials in Sandoval County, New Mexico were dispensing dozens of marriage licenses to homosexuals before being shut down by that state’s attorney general.

Back on the East Coast, in Nyack, New York, the town’s gay mayor said he would mimic New Paltz mayor Jason West and begin dispensing marriage licenses to other homosexuals. Mayor John Shields said he would also seek a marriage license for himself and his sex partner. Later, when this former school teacher was denied a marriage license, Shields “pledged to sue the state,” according to the New York Times.

Within the same week as all these other shenanigans, Carolyn K. Peterson, the mayor of Ithaca, New York “told a packed news conference at City Hall that the clerk would accept marriage applications by same-sex couples and forward them to the state’s Department of Health for a ruling on whether they could be granted. In doing so, she said, she would force the issue into the courts,” according to the Times (3/2/04). In the event that the Health Department should reject the gay-marriage applications, declared Mayor Peterson, she would direct the taxpayer-funded city bureaucracy to coordinate with students from nearby Cornell University to give legal advice to homosexuals for their legal assault on New York State’s marriage statutes.

The mayor of Buffalo, New York is also a defender of same-sex unions, but Mayor Anthony M. Masiello took a more prudent stance. “I’m not going to break any laws or create chaos by illegally marrying people,” said Mr. Masiello. “Why create a false sense of legality?”

New York City

Three gay and lesbian couples posed for the news media and were “married” on the steps of City Hall on March 18, 2004, in an act of civil disobedience. Christian and Jewish clergy solemnized the homosexual couplings even though the city clerk’s office had refused to dispense marriage licenses to homosexuals. The Reverend Pat Bumgardner, the female pastor of the overwhelmingly gay Metropolitan Community Church, officiated: “With the authority vested in me by the church and recognized by the state, I pronounce your marriage solemnized. You may kiss…” A lesbian couple said they wanted their City Hall ceremony to show solidarity with Jason West, the mayor of New Paltz, who was facing charges for performing marriages for gay couples without licenses.

Mayor Bloomberg dismissed the ceremonies as more “theater than anything else” and suggested that gays do their demonstrating in Albany where the state’s laws are made. The attending clergy vowed to keep on solemnizing homosexual relationships “regardless of the narrowness of the interpretation of the law imposed upon us by our current government.” They did their best to make this “narrow interpretation” sound almost capricious when, in fact, it is the definition of marriage in our culture, the institutionalized expression of the biologically-rooted sentiments of everyone but a comparative handful of biological oddballs whose paraphilia (strange love) places them and their gay counter-cultural values at odds with the moral health of marriage itself.

On April 7th, 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against New York State’s Department of Health on behalf of 13 same-sex couples whose plans to be married by the renegade mayor of New Paltz were dashed when the mayor was slapped with criminal charges. Their “marriages” never happened because Jason West, who had officiated at 25 same-sex ceremonies in a New Paltz parking lot, was hit with 19 misdemeanor counts of solemnizing unlicensed unions. The same charges were leveled at the two lesbian Unitarian ministers who took over his assembly-line style marriage mill after West was stopped by a court-ordered injunction.

This lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court, brought to three the number of suits filed in New York by advocates of homosexual wedlock. Each case was filed in a different jurisdiction, covering three of the state’s four judicial regions; each case challenged existing marriage law in a slightly different way. The lawyers involved expect all of these cases to be bundled together sometime in the next two years as the cases wend their way to the state’s highest judicial level, the Court of Appeals.

To showcase one of their lawsuits, the American Civil Liberties Union called the media to a Manhattan photo-op where the gay plaintiffs were trotted out to demonstrate what nice people they were. “It is not about partisan politics, it is not about culture wars,” intoned a lawyer for the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. “It is about having the right to visit one’s spouse in the hospital or make a medical decision in case of emergency.”

That’s a lie; it’s a smokescreen to conceal the underlying gay-agenda objective of legitimizing gayness and the social paradigms of the gay counterculture. This is all about a war between two cultures. Any medical emergency or visitation glitches would be resolved by a simple contractual agreement between the homosexual partners. The lawyers for the plaintiffs know this; the plaintiffs know this. If the cash-heavy “gay community” put as much of their disposable income into creating a legal fund to provide gays with such simple contracts, then the “emergency problem” and the “visitation problem” would vanish. But gays don’t want these problems to vanish because they are such useful tools for prying sympathetic support from politically clueless heterosexuals.

Hallmark Card Jurisprudence

On February 4th, 2005 a New York State judge in Manhattan ruled that a state law that denied marriage to homosexual couples was unconstitutional. With this ruling Justice Doris Ling-Cohan became the only state-level judge to side with gay-marriage advocates. It was her opinion that New York’s Domestic Relations Law deprived homosexuals of equal protection and due process. She tried to bolster her opinion by including a bogus analogy between New York’s Domestic Relations Law, which merely restates the traditional definition of marriage, and bygone laws that once barred interracial marriage. This utopian in a black robe airily declared that the words used in defining marriage – husband and wife, bride and groom – shall henceforth “be construed to apply equally to either men or women.”

Justice Ling-Cohan’s opinion, which favored the arguments of lawyers for Lambda Legal on behalf of five homosexual couples, is limited to New York County, which effectively limits its impact to the gay haven of New York City. She stayed her opinion for 30 days; if the city doesn’t appeal her decision, then the clerk’s office must begin dispensing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Local Democrats immediately called on the mayor to support the court ruling. According to the New York Times, “To forgo an appeal could, at least temporarily, ‘turn New York City into a gay marriage Mecca’, said one city official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.” Eventually, a challenge to the traditional definition of marriage will arrive at the Court of Appeals, and that court’s word on the matter will be final. Three other state judges have previously ruled against gay marriage advocates, most recently in Ulster County, the day before Judge Ling-Cohan’s ruling in New York County.

Referring to Judge Ling-Cohan, a spokesman for Governor Pataki said, “The governor strongly believes the judge’s decision is wrong. New York’s marriage laws are clear that marriage is between a man and a woman and any changes to our laws should be made through the legislative process, not by a judge or local officials.”

Judge Ling-Cohan, however, was sealed inside her personal bubble of feel-good ideology. Her written decision reads like something from the Hallmark Card collection: “Similar to opposite-sex couples, same-sex couples are entitled to the same fundamental right to follow their hearts and publicly commit to a lifetime partnership with the person of their choosing.” So who’s stopping them? Love doesn’t require a license.

She concludes that “marriage is viewed by society as the utmost expression of a couple’s commitment and love; plaintiffs may now seek this ultimate expression through a civil marriage.” But marriage is also a badge of legitimacy; the judge has clearly redefined what a marriage is; she has radically altered its essence in a bid to confer legitimacy, not equal protection, on homosexual behaviors.

Judge Ling-Cohan’s opinion put the squeeze on Mayor Bloomberg; there was an approaching election; he must now pander to Manhattan’s powerful gay voting block. At a dinner bash thrown by the cash-heavy Human Rights Campaign at the swank Waldorf-Astoria, Mayor Bloomberg characterized the court decision as “something to celebrate.” Parroting the judge’s sappy sentiments, Bloomberg charmed the gays with “I think people have a right to love, to live and to marry whoever they want, regardless of their sexual orientation.” The gays loved it; they jumped up and cheered.

Both the judge and the mayor were inventing a brand-new “right”, one that no one suspected existed until the invention of a brand-new paradigm, the one that recast homosexuals as “an oppressed minority.” This was done by the Marxist dialectician Harry Hay in 1946. After that, gays had to overcome the stigma of homosexuality as a behavioral disorder, which was cosmetically achieved by a totally bogus mail-in ballot conducted by the American Psychiatric Association. Never before or since has the status of a mental disorder been decided by a vote. Only 25% of the membership bothered to return a ballot, so the voting group was small and self-selected. Later, the association membership broadly repudiated this ballot when they discovered that the mailing, including the wording of the questions, had been crafted and financed by gay radicals meeting in closed-door sessions with a select group of the association’s administrators.

So gayness never really got a clean bill of health from the APA membership. Many mental health professionals still believe that homosexuality is a behavioral disorder, though it is now dangerous for them to say so openly. In the years since that bogus vote the professional counseling associations have become so thoroughly colonized by homosexuals that no meaningful vote could be taken today. It would be like polling NAMBLA for their opinions on man/boy relations.

The existing laws allow all adult males and females to marry; homosexuals simply choose not to marry because they are usually not interested in marrying someone of their complementary gender. They may choose not to own a firearm also, or to vote; it is their choice not to exercise these rights. They have not been denied equal protection; they are seeking to redefine a social institution that is not closed to them.

Mayor Bloomberg took the glow off the Waldorf party when he announced his intention to appeal the judge’s ruling. He said he wanted to spare gays the false hope of a marriage privilege like the one that had been extended by San Francisco’s Mayor Newsom. He was roundly booed. He told the gays that he would work with them to pass gay-marriage legislation. City Councilwoman Christine Quinn, a lesbian who represents Greenwich Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, said she was horrified by Bloomberg’s decision to appeal the ruling. She called his support a “Johnny-come-lately position.”

The mayor bid adieu to Carson Kressley of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” who came to the party dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants, and to the Waldorf crowd, and sped away to the Lesbian & Gay Pride dinner-dance in Queens, where he was heckled as a “liar” and a “hypocrite.” According to the Times, “Despite the hostility, Mr. Bloomberg did not bolt, taking time to shake the hand of anyone who was not yelling at him.”

San Francisco Isn’t Selma

The proponents of same-sex marriage are promoting the notion that there are no meaningful differences between homosexual male relationships and the shared intimacy of a husband and wife, even in matters of childrearing and role modeling. They are telling society that its belief that mothers and fathers both matter is just nonsense, a hateful bias and a form of impermissible discrimination. In their proposed utopia any preference for the mother-&-father family paradigm would be condemned as “bias” and its advocates denounced as “bigots.” Once gays have penetrated the legitimizing institution of marriage, the very idea that children deserve a mother and a father will become the moral equivalent of racism. Once their novel paradigms are in place, the force of law will be used to quash all expressions of pro-mom-&-dad “prejudice.” The ever-leftward drift of public-school curricula will embrace these novel social forms and will mold young minds to accept them as normal. All the while, the queer theorists will cling tenaciously to the silly contention that homosexuals are an oppressed minority “just like black folks” and that the trajectory of gay social progress should imitate that of black Americans. This is more hooey.

First of all, the now-vanished laws that once forbade interracial heterosexual marriage were not contrived to defend the institution of marriage, but to preserve a social structure that allowed the domination of black people. Interracial marriage never threatened the sweeping cross-cultural purposes of marriage; it threatened white privilege. Eventually, white folks came to see the system of airtight racial segregation as something that was harmful to the moral health of American civilization.

So, for the queer-theory simile of gays and blacks to work, homosexual marriage must not threaten the traditional purposes of marriage and the wholesale embrace of gay countercultural values, perspectives and behaviors, which the legitimization of gay marriage will entail, must not be harmful to the moral health of American civilization. Seen this way, the simile is preposterous. The more Americans learn about gay marriage and homosexual behavioral norms, the more uneasy they become. As of this writing, even 55 percent of Democrats favor the arduous task of pursuing a constitutional amendment to rivet in place a simple national legal definition of marriage.

The awkward fit between homosexual norms and the institution of marriage was always a problem for gay activists. By wrapping the whole matter up in the guise of a civil rights issue gay radicals could avoid detailed discussions of either homosexual behaviors or the societal purposes of marriage. They could jabber endlessly about fairness and portray traditionalists as heartless dunderheads.

The paradox of why so many homosexuals are working so hard to gain entrée to an institution that gays generally disdain is solved when we recall the nasty brawl over gay marriage in Scandinavia. Once gays had achieved official recognition they stayed away from marriage in droves. What they really wanted was total social acceptance and the eradication of homosexual stigma. Gays imagine marriage to be the ultimate gay-stigma cleanser.

Love does not require marriage, but to get that feeling of being “just like everyone else” requires at least the possibility of marriage, even if it is never resorted to, even if actual marriage is held in low regard.

Natural procreation is beyond homosexuals; nature does not obligate homosexuals to perpetuate our species. The difference between the two sexual orientations is far greater than that between any two races of people. Through the ages, and across cultures, heterosexual marriage has been entwined with the responsibilities of parenthood. Gay culture, by contrast, has always resembled an erotic amusement park, a “we never close” sexual buffet. Gay love is all about adult fulfillment, free of the expectation of parenthood, unthreatened by the possibility of accidental parenthood. Gays are free to explore the possibilities of their gay inclinations which would, more often than not, be inhibited by any mimicry of heterosexual marriage. A thoroughly “open” gay marriage would simply be a mockery of traditional marriage. Either way, gays will never be more than pretenders to an institution anchored in procreation. Their attempts to obliterate homosexual stigma through marriage is a misuse of marriage, a desperate bid to gain straight acceptance through acts of self-denial.

The strained analogies to bygone civil rights struggles collapse altogether when gays start praising those renegade mayors, judges, clerks and clergy who made the year 2004 such a lawless circus. Rosa Parks and Dr. King were private citizens. They had at their disposal the power of moral persuasion, not the power of government. This is not the case with the mayors of San Francisco, New Paltz, Nyack and Asbury Park and the clerks, commissioners and councilmen in so many places who betrayed the public trust by using the power delegated to them to weaken the framework of laws that they took an oath of office to defend. These lawless jerks are the government. In their headstrong arrogance they resemble no one so much as Governor George Wallace when he just took it into his head to prevent black students from enrolling in the University of Alabama. It’s what he wanted to do, so he used the power of his office to flout the legal framework he had taken an oath to uphold. He became a law unto himself.

This was the fashion stance of gay-friendly politicos in 2004. Their bad behavior was not forgotten when America went to the polls in November of that year.

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