Gay Marriage: Why Can't We Talk Without Shouting?

I think people's offence at being called homophobic can be explained like this: People have a sense that prejudice and discrimination are bad, but they think of themselves as being good people. Good people obviously do not do bad things. Therefore, when they oppose equality for gays, they're not expressing bigotry or discriminating against them; they're merely treating different things differently. I'm sure a lot of people who opposed interracial marriage were the same. "I'm not racist. I have nothing against blacks. (I just don't want one of them to marry my daughter.)" I've engaged many people on the topic of marriage equality and although I can easily refute their arguments I can never change their minds. Facts and logic are powerless to dispel what their intuition tells them is right.

We have come to a point where nearly everybody recognizes that men and women should be treated the same by the law and by employers in nearly everything. One of the very few exceptions is marriage law... and even then, the distinction vanishes once the wedding is over: there are no longer any legal differences in the rights or obligations of husband and a wife, even if some lazy divorce court judges do assign children to the woman and expenses to the man automatically rather than doing their jobs and deciding based on the merits of the individual situation. We also do not, despite what some insist, base marriage on procreation. Any law relating marriage to children is completely optional to the institution, coming into play only if and when the family in question actually contains a child. Those married couples who do not, or even cannot possibly, have children are every bit as much married before the law as a couple who has a baker's dozen of them. So... if marriage is not, in this country, based on the production of offspring (which it isn't) and there are no legal differences in the roles of a husband and of a wife, then there is no logical reason to require that both parties to the marriage be of the opposite sex. As for name-calling... whether it's accurate or not, it's at best unhelpful. I've never yet heard a reason given to oppose same-sex marriage that, if you keep digging by asking "but why" long enough and if the person presenting the reason has the decency and comprehension to give meaningful answers, does not eventually boil down to some variation of "gay people are inferior." You may say that fits well within the definition of bigotry, but applying that name does no good unless the person has come to realize it for themselves. Calling someone a name doesn't make them think about whether it might apply after all or not: it just makes them think you're a mean person who hates them, which is no way to win someone over. The only way to convince people they're wrong, where it's possible at all, is to demonstrate through day to day living that we're basically people just like anyone else.

Wouldn't you consider people opposed to interracial marriage as racist? It's the same comparison. The same arguments used back then, including the Bible, are used today to justify oppression of a maligned minority. 50 years from now hopefully everyone will regard opponents of same-sex marriage the same way that we regard opponents of interracial marriage today.

"Phobic" just means "irrational fear". And that is precisely what all arguments opposing Equal Marriage are based on. The need to "Protecr marriage" implies that marriage is threatened by allowing same gender couples equal access to civil marriage. I have yet to hear a rational explaination how same gender civil marriages jeopordize, threaten, weaken, diminish, or harm the institution of marriage. All the reasons are based on irrational fear(s). In other words, phobias.