Skepchick: The Metro Makes the Case for Bigotry

To Lewis, it’s not about quarantining gays as second-class citizens. It's about upholding a long-standing tradition that he sees as unifying American society.

"Not everyone who voted for Proposition 8 is an anti-gay bigot," he said. "Some of us have true, heartfelt concerns about where our society is headed."

Oh, now it's clear: gays shouldn't be able to marry because straight people's ability to get married is unifying American society. Let's be clear: heterosexual marriage isn't even unifying heterosexuals, since the divorce rate is currently 40 to 50%. Also, if you don't want gays to marry because you're worried about the negative effects it would have on society, you're either bigoted or ignorant, since gay marriage hasn't yet destroyed Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, Norway, and Sweden. Nor has it screwed up Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Iowa. In fact, allowing gays to marry is more likely to strengthen the economy. Imagine that!

Another genius quoted by the Metro is Grant Inderbitzen of Modesto, California, with this winning argument:

"Marriage has a definition that does not include two men or two women," Inderbitzen said. "It's like, if someone found a new color, they can't call it 'blue.' Blue already exists."

Checkmate, equal rights activists! We all know that there's only one kind of "blue!" In the same way that "marriage" has always meant "one man plus one woman," never in the history of the universe has the word "blue" ever meant anything even slightly different from this exact shade of blue.

That article, headlined Prop 8 supporters: Don't call us bigots, was just the warm-up. The real winner is the sidebar opinion piece penned by Timothy Dalrymple, titled Gay marriage disturbs the natural order. It includes gems such as:

The Christian views of the sanctity of marriage and the potential harm of homosexual marriage arise from basic Christian convictions on what it means to be human.

Ah. So, married heterosexuals are human and married homosexuals are not. Singletons are presumably somewhere in between. Got it. Dalrymple goes on to say that homosexuals are unable to find fulfillment and learn to love "across the deepest divide." By which he means the divide between a penis and a vagina.

But wait! It gets better!

We can no more revise the basis of marriage than we can revise the laws governing atoms.

Read that again. Process. Okay, proceed.

Let's start by examining how Christians have revised the basis of marriage since the printing of the Bible. As Betty Bowers recently pointed out, the Bible offers some interesting ideas of what marriage should be. For instance, in the case of King David, marriage is between a man, a woman, nine other women, and scores of concubines. Also, Deuteronomy 2:28-29 mandates that a woman must marry any man who rapes her, provided the rapist pays her father 50 shekels of silver.

Meanwhile, the laws governing atoms continue to not exist. See, Dalrymple has confused the idea of a law that politicians enact to control how we behave and a law that scientists develop to explain the way the world behaves. And guess what? Atoms behave the same way now—when gays are marrying—as they did thousands of years ago, when Abram (Genesis 16) was banging his wife and his wife's slave girl Hagar, who also became his wife.

Dalrymple wraps up by mentioning that gays can't live lives that "lead to complete wholeness and healing," so that's a shame. But he's not a bigot! Some of his best friends are gay, and he's so totally sad they're incomplete, unloving, unloved, offensive, unfulfilled broken sinners who will surely rot in the bowels of hell.