Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong

They just are.

I’ve started a page on gay marriage and I’m having a hard time being balanced about it– the vast majority of arguments against it are “I HATE GAYS.”

One that almost makes sense is pointing out the fact that health insurance is tied in to marriage and employment, and that gay marriage could increase insurance costs borne by employers — at least, those that have a lot of married same-sex employees. But that’s a problem that needs to be fixed in the insurance policy, not in marriage policy. (That sounds like a software engineer blaming the hardware, but it’s true. As an aside, I wonder whether a better health system in the US would reduce the urgency of the gay marriage fight.)

I did, however, find one old article in the Weekly Standard, that brings up points I hadn’t thought of before. It’s a pretty conservative magazine, and I expected it to be full of the same “the queers are trying to push religion around” vitriol that everyone else spouts. But instead it starts with Catholic Charities, the Boston-based adoption agency that shut down rather than comply with the anti-discrimination laws of the state, and moves on to a Catholic high school that expelled a couple of homosexual students. If a religious school can’t prohibit actions and proclamations that it believes to be sinful, is it even a religious school any more?

Well, maybe. There are, after all, still segregated groups and schools which oppose interracial dating. Awhile back, Bob Jones University lost tax-exempt status over its (now, finally, abandoned) policy of prohibiting interracial dating. Before that, back in the 50s, there was a program of massive resistance to integration, which led several Virginia school systems to close down completely rather than integrate. Private, segregated schools (often supported by early school-voucher programs) cropped up in their place. But as segregation became less acceptable to the world, and as the IRS started taxing them like for-profit enterprises they closed or integrated.

Just like racism hasn’t disappeared, anti-discrimination law will never force groups to abandon their beliefs that homosexuality is a sin. But groups that actually do discriminate against same-sex couples will have to do so without state recognition, without state favors like tax-exemption, and without sympathy from the public. In the long run, people who don’t accept the equality of same-sex unions will be regarded in the same way that we now regard the segregationists of the past.