The co-founder and former chair of the National Organization For Marriage pens an open letter to presumed swing vote Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, lamenting the persecution of Christians over same-sex marriage.

Since the dawn of time, and practically from birth, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people have been stigmatized, ridiculed, treated as second-class citizens, verbally and physically attacked, stoned to death or otherwise murdered in the name of religion, forced to hide their true selves, forced to marry a person of the opposite sex to hide their sexuality and to advance their careers, and so much more.

In America today, Christians make up about 80 percent of the U.S. population. And some of them are LGBT.

Today, National Organization For Marriage co-founder and former chairman Maggie Gallagher chose to all but ignore the centuries of hate and harm bestowed upon gay people, in an open letter she wrote to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is presumed to be the swing vote in the same-sex marriage case heard this week.

Gallagher identifies Christians as the “newly stigmatized,” in her farcical rewriting of history.

“The forces for gay marriage are powerful,” she begins. “You have been their hero in the past, when gay people were not so powerful. The tables are turned now, as I think is clear to everyone. The LGBT community has built a powerful cultural, legal, and political movement. They are not helpless or friendless. They do not need you to distort the Constitution to win the right to live as they choose. We who believe in the traditional understanding of marriage do need your help. We live at a time when our livelihoods are under new attack, when our standing as equal citizens is under attack, when the system of ideas and the deep human realities that gave rise to marriage for millennia are now being dismissed as mere bigotry, as irrational, incomprehensible hatred.”

Of course, with the exception of less than two dozen nondiscrimination cases across the country against business owners like cake bakers and florists who refuse to follow the same laws their friends and neighbors are obliged to, the idea that “our livelihoods are under new attack” is preposterous. Meanwhile, despite gains on the marriage front, LGBT people can be and are fired from their jobs in the majority of states across the nation, yet Gallagher has never once denounced that, nor supported a nondiscrimination law for LGBT people.

That “millennia” claim, as the world knows all too well, is also false. Marriage for centuries was about property rights, and in many biblical cases, the more property, the merrier.

The one thing I have always marveled about Maggie Gallagher is her unyielding habit of saying what she thinks and believes, despite how it sounds. In a way that’s brave, given how ugly and privileged what she thinks and believes truly is.

For instance, despite how ugly this sounds, Gallagher has no compunction about posting it:

“It is not true that same-sex and opposite-sex couples are equal. Not all sexual relationships are equal, even if they are loving and committed. Same-sex couples have to deal with the preference that the majority has for opposite-sex relationships, ranging from mama’s slight mourning for the family her son will likely never have to Westboro Baptist’s awful, crude, ugly, and unchristian hatred. Opposite-sex couples have the task of managing the reality that from the about age 14 until the woman ages out around 45, every single act of sex could make new life. Nothing the Supreme Court says or does about marriage will change these realities, but importing gay marriage into our Constitution will unleash a cavalcade of consequences for traditional believers.”

Gallagher goes on to claim that equality “will require continual policing, because it is based on an untruth about human nature.” 

In reality, much of society today exists as “an untruth about human nature.” If it didn’t, murder would be legal, so would robbery, rape, etc. Human nature is both beautiful and beastly, and that’s a very basic truth.

And she continues her impassioned insanity, claiming “sustaining marriage privately, without public or governmental approval, will become immeasurably harder, as the portions of society most committed to marriage, classically understood, become consumed with the task of figuring out how they survive the hatred and dhimmitude directed their way.” 

No, allowing gay people the rights and responsibilities of marriage will not make non-gay people less likely to marry. If any straight person refuses to marry because gay people are marrying, they need a psychiatric exam, not a law banning the civil rights of those they oppose.

“Government cannot confer dignity on our relationships,” Gallagher, wrongly concludes. “My best friends, my adult children, my godchildren, my brothers and sisters, every single intimate relationship that I have and that gives meaning to my life, government has no role there. To imagine that a government stamp of approval is what creates value in human relationships, or gives dignity to our sexual lives, is to accord to government a power it does not have: a power to impose an idea of equality that is not true, and to remove from the American people the hard work — of negotiating, compromise, and dealing with one another — that belongs to the democratic process, not the Constitution.”

Almost two years ago I experienced one of the greatest moments of joy in my life, the moment I married my partner. I know other gay men who tell me, as I felt, that it was a life-changing moment, that they felt, as did I, transformed. I don’t know, but I have a suspicion, that many gay people have felt that when they married. Perhaps because a decade ago we barely dreamed we ever could marry, but claiming that legal civil marriage does not “confer dignity on our relationships” is a falsehood of huge proportions. 

Update:

Jeremy Hooper at Good As You adds his usual brilliant insight:

The reason Maggie has to claim that people like me cannot exist without reducing our oppositional voices as being driven by “bigotry, as irrational, incomprehensible hatred” is because she cannot admit that her movement’s ideas—ideas she very much helped develop, let’s always remember—have simply lost out in the public square. Increasingly, people like Maggie like to pretend that this has been something other than a robust debate and that activists like her have had less of a chance to engage. Bull.Crap.

 

This article has been updated and edited. 

Image by WisPolitics.com via Flickr and a CC license
Hat tip: Daily Kos