I hate it when it turns out I'm not a paraoid nutjob...

[Don Corleone]

Well, in the past 4 years, gay marriage has been a frequent issue for debate here in the backroom. On the one side are people that believe that marriage should be recognized and allowed for any two consenting adults. Then there are those that believe marriage should be defined as between a a man and a woman.

People that believe marriage should be allowed for gay couples are almost always talking about legal marriage. They claim that the reason gay people have pushed so hard for marriage in the first place is because of the special legal and tax benefits state-endorsed marriage confer upon the couple.

There is a third group in the debate, of which I'm one of the leading proponents. We agree that legally recognized benefits must be available to all adults within a particular legal system and that the state itself cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation (discriminate in this sense meaning differentiate, not necessarily treat punitively). But we also hold that marriage in the religious construct should be dictated by the tenets of a particular religion, and we see the insistence on the term 'marriage' itself as indicative of an agenda by gay rights group to force religious bodies to alter their practices and adopt behavior and teachings in line with what the gay advocacy groups dictate the religious groups should want. Call us the Civil Union crew.

"Hogwash", have answered certain naysayers. "You're just being paranoid and a nutjob. Gay people aren't interested in changing religious practices, and you're invoking a strawman ". I've heard this quite a bit, but mostly from my good friend Goofball, who thinks I'm intentionally invoking slippery slope arguments that will never come to pass, just to cloud the issue and play semantics games as a backdoor to actual discrimination (I resist using the term marriage, because I want to rub gay people's nose in that they have to settle for civil unions, not because I'm really afraid of infringement on my rights to free practice of religion).

Well, lo and behold, that bastion of the Vast-Right-Wing Conspiracy, NPR, had a piece on this morning that makes my case far better than I ever could. So I'll simply leave you all with a link, and a blatant I TOLD YOU SO!!!