Over at Salon, Mark Oppenheimer has a longish, interesting piece on Maggie Gallagher, NRO hack, NOM founder and arguably the most prominent opponent of marriage equality in the US. I read it because the thing that has always puzzled me most about the gay marriage controversy is why those who oppose it are so convinced it is a threat to straight marriage, and I wondered if Gallagher would offer any fresh rationales. Alas, no.
As Oppenheimer says, for fundamentalists, the answer is straightforward enough, if kooky. But I’ve never heard people who accessorize their opposition to gay marriage with supposedly secular arguments make a convincing case for why marriage equality is bad for society in general. The arguments always come down to someone’s personal conviction that it must be so, and that conviction is almost invariably derived from a personal experience projected planet-wide.
Gallagher is no exception: For her, it all boils down to her unshakable conviction that the ideal for every child is to be raised by its biological parents and that the institution of marriage must be exclusively about facilitating that arrangement or else, I dunno, cats and dogs, living together. She offers no convincing evidence for this conviction and baldly asserts that there is no evidence to the contrary that could convince her otherwise.