It's hard to be consistant when you don't have a coherent argument

In the many internet debates I have had with "social conservatives" (you know, those people so conservative that, while they oppose government intervention in most aspects of life, curiously don't seem to object to government camping out in people's bedrooms), one of their fall back arguments is that gay marriage must be prohibited because the government has such a compelling interest in encouraging procreation - an interest so compelling that it trumps the equal protection rights of gays and lesbians.

I can here the social "conservatives" scream now, "There is no right to gay marriage!" Indeed, we are all aware that when these immortal words were written, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" that there was a tiny asterisk next to them, and a foot note at the bottom of the document that said "unless you're queer". Oh wait, no there wasn't. Nor was there an asterisk when the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1868 which guaranteed to all Americans, "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Notwithstanding the legal issues above, the crusaders on the right insist that allowing gays to marriage will doom the human race because, if gays marry, people will have less babies. For the life of me, the only basis for this absurd notion that I can think of is the belief that they seem to have that gay people "choose" to be gay, so, if society won't let them get married, they will eventually give up and turn straight and go have a half dozen kids, or, conversely, if gay people can get married, maybe they are afraid people will turn gay in massive quantities. It is on, apparently, this rather naive understanding of human sexuality that they insist marriage must be preserved as a straights only club. Of course, this whole view ignores the fact that infertile couples are allowed to wed, as well as the elderly, and people who just don't want to have kids - like the people featured on ABC news this week.

So, with the procreation argument in mind, here is the inconsistency: One News Now, the propaganda division of the American "Family" Association, has published an article blasting an LA fertility clinic that is helping gay men have children with surrogate mothers. Wait a sec? Shouldn't they be happy that the homos figured out how to breed? Nope.

In this amazing work of investigative journalism they got Dr. Paul Cameron, and ONLY Dr. Cameron, to give them some choice quotes. For those unfamiliar with Dr. Cameron, he was booted out of the American Psychological Association in 1983 for misconduct and, in 1985, the American Sociological Association issued a resolution which, in part, read, "Dr. Paul Cameron has repeatedly campaigned for the abrogation of the civil rights of lesbians and gay men, substantiating his call on the basis of his distorted interpretation of this research." For those who still doubt Dr. Cameron may have some sort of bias on this issue that may, shall we say, cloud his "professional" judgment, on the website of the Family Research Institute, which is the organization he leads, Dr. Cameron has a lovely little page entitled "Can Anything Be Done to Stop Gay Rights?".

Anyway, our fine, upstanding friend in the scientific community sums up why all good Christians should oppose letting gays have kids, ""Gays are more apt to raise homosexually-inclined children, and if the children don't turn out homosexually inclined, they turn out to be somewhere between confused [and] not very stable." So, basically, to paraphrase, gays can't have children because they make more gay children, or if that doesn't happen, they will be screwed up anyway.. Hmm.. So, one has to wonder, if gay parents make gay kids, I guess that means that either Vice President Cheney, or his wife, is a closet case. Not to mention Alan Keyes (rabid anti-gay nut case who was made a fool of in Borat) or his wife, Philis Schlafly (conservative crusader) or her husband and Randall Terry (Operation Rescue) or his wife, must be gay, after all, they had gay kids. Now, realizing that the people listed above are probably all straight, and given that gay couples with kids is a fairly new phenomena, one has to wonder where all the gay adults we have now came from? Apparently straight parents can crank out the homos too.

But, even if the kids don't go all queer and, somehow, by the grace of God, end up normal straight people, Dr Cameron insists they are still tainted little muggles, and will all end up whores. He says, "They're more apt to shack-up, they're more apt to have a series of promiscuous kinds of relationships, And if they do get married -- and they're less apt to get married -- their marriages tend to be less stable, as near as we can tell." As near as we can tell? Is that a scientific term? Once can imagine Sir Issac Newton proudly declaring "There is this thing called gravity, as near as we can tell." However, lets suppose Dr. Cameron is right, and the product of gay parents are a bunch of promiscuous little heterosexual whores running around screwing anything they find, shouldn't the social conservatives be happy? After all, all that straight sex is gonna produce what? MORE BABIES!