If marriage is simply what our culture/society defines it to be, then presumably having two mummies or daddies would be just as good as any other arrangement, if it were not for the prejudices and hangups of society and especially those unenlightened people who still cling to a religious understanding of sex.

If men and women were interchangeable, gay marriage wouldn’t be necessary.

But it turns out they are not interchangeable.

I am old enough to remember the 1970s, when a lot of men were shamed for not being more female-like, and women were more blatantly shamed for not being more male-like. I myself attended a college course where we were all drilled on how gender is this artificial construct, and how the world will be so much better once we force boys and girls into androgyny.

The problem is, reality didn’t cooperate. It turns out that no amount of forcing boys to wear skirts and carry purses will make them into what they are not.

The reason two moms or two dads is not as good is not because society has hangups, but because it turns out there are real and significant differences between same-sex and opposite-sex parent relationships.

A same-sex parent relationship is a role model relationship: this parent teaches you “how to be”. From his father, a boy learns how to be a man. From her mother, a girl learns how to be a woman. Being a man isn’t the same as being a woman. A man can’t teach a girl how to be a woman the way a woman can, and when puberty hits, if the girl is talking to her dad about menstruation on the same level of intimacy as a girl might talk to her mom, the relationship is probably dysfunctional (ditto in reverse the boy who feels perfectly comfortable talking about wet dreams with his mom).

An opposite-sex parent relationship is different in kind. From this parent, a child learns a whole bunch of different things – how to handle those who are not like ourselves; how to interrelate with members of the opposite sex; how to have relationships.

Children need both. But just as importantly, children have reason to value both. To expect them to do without one of these relationships is selfish – not the sort of thing a “loving” person does to someone they “love”. But to expect them to do without one of these relationships and then expect that they’ll back you up when you go around bragging that they don’t care about losing what you’ve stolen from them – that’s just plain toxic-level dysfunctional. That’s not how good parents are.

You have just experienced something all too common – let’s call it ‘cognitive divergence’ i.e. as soon as people sense your opinion differs from theirs they abandon any attempt to read and understand your words and snap immediately into ad hominem attacks and/or unsupported claims of moral superiority.

If marriage is simply what our culture/society defines it to be, then presumably having two mummies or daddies would be just as good as any other arrangement, if it were not for the prejudices and hangups of society and especially those unenlightened people who still cling to a religious understanding of sex.

I seem to remember a long time ago paedophiles put forth this kind of argument in favour of recognizing “inter-generational relationships”, but I could be wrong.

It is not harmful for gay people to not marry. What is harmful is when they do marry and start a family, if their doing so is built on lies.

Like the lie that a child “can have two mommies”. That’s not true – every child has a mother and a father, and forcing a child to pretend that being fatherless is no big deal is harmful. It’s emotional abuse.

Gay marriage arguments fall apart when you stop pretending that gays are the only people with feelings or rights. The truth is, the real problem with gay marriage isn’t that conservatives are telling lies – hysterical or otherwise; it’s the gays who are telling lies: having two mothers is not just as good as having an intact family. If gender were interchangeable gays and lesbians could just marry people of the opposite sex, but there’s more to being a man or a woman – and that’s more true for children, who have distinct and different relationships with same-sex than with opposite-sex parents.

It’s not nice to steal things of value from your kids.

By the way, if your goal in capitalizing the word “gay” was to add dignity or importance, I think you accomplished exactly the reverse (by trying to elevate a word that isn’t a proper noun to proper noun status with such a transparent gimmick).

However: look at the general trend of lower anti-Gay votes over time. Hawaii and Alaska passed their amendments in 1998 with 68% or 69%. North Carolina passed their amendment in 2012 with 62%. I don’t think anyone would claim NC is more liberal than Hawaii, or more libertarian than Alaska.

California passed prop 22 in 2000 with 62% anti-Gay vote, and the essentially identical prop 8 in 2008 with 52%. You do the math for a revote in 2014.

Bottom line: Unless the anti-Gay side presents greater number of hysterical lies this year than they did in 2008, the amendment will fail in Minnesota, and marriage equality will be affirmed in Washington, Maryland and Maine. Too many people have Gay family, friends and neighbors, and increasing numbers are unwilling to harm those they love. The steady drop in support for bans in opinion polls will eventually be matched at the ballot box.