The Social Conservatives' Misguided War on Gay Marriage

When the midterm election campaign season started heating up last summer, social conservatives started a completely coincidental, yet timely push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Right-wing Republican senators like Bill Frist and Rick Santorum dragged the issue to the top of the Senate's agenda, in an attempt to excite the Republican party's disillusioned supporters enough to actually show up and vote for them in November. Having failed to rally any support from their traditional supporters on important issues like the Iraq war, immigration, social security, and foreign oil dependence, Frist and Co. decided the best way to fire up the base was to zero in on a far more pressing issue: fags tying the knot.

The conservative stance

Their argument was (and remains) simple: Marriage, traditionally between a man and a woman, is the most basic institution of social order and stability in our society, and this institution must be protected and preserved. Gay marriage is a threat to traditional American values, and its allowance would undercut the country's social foundation and encourage "non-traditional lifestyles," resulting in a future generation with no sense of morality (unlike the current adult generation, whose moral values are uniformly pristine, as evidenced by the spotless records of Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, William Jefferson, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove ... ).

Said Frist, "For thousands of years, marriage - the union between a man and a woman - has been recognized as an essential cornerstone of society ... We must continue fighting to ensure the Constitution is amended." Added Santorum, "I think that marriage is such an important thing, and families are such an important thing for a society, that it needs to be enshrined in a very, very unique way." So unique, apparently, that only the 90-plus percent of American adults that are straight should be allowed to partake in it. Oh, the novelty.

Baseless arguments