Not Even Close, David

A couple of days ago I posted this quote from the Grand Inquisitor: "Marriage is hate. Marriage is a stain. Marriage is an evil thing. That's what we hear."---and I challenged Mr. Santorum to attribute those remarks. Someone named David apparently thinks he can:

From the 9/4/2003 Senate Testimony of...Maggie Gallagher:

As one advocate for gay marriage, columnist and radio personality Michaelangelo Signorile put it in Out Magazine in December of 1994, “[F]ight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution that as it now stands keeps us down.”

Is that a good start? I'm sure I can find more.

No that's a pretty feeble start. Scanning, wait for it, hold on...nope, no use of the words "stain," "evil, or "hate." I sort of doubt that David is familiar with Michael Signorile's career, so he might be interested to learn that Mr. Signorile is on the fringe of the fringe of radical gay politics. His one and only claim to fame is to have published horrendous invasions of privacy, "outing" political opponents against their will, and in the most famous case, exposing the fact that Andrew Sullivan had posted a personal ad on a website for gay men interested in "barebacking." Since I think David's head might explode if he knew what that term referred to, I won't explain.

Next, consider the time that this article was written: December 1994. Know why gay marriage wasn't such a big issue back then? Because with very few exceptions, all the leading gay activists wanted nothing to do with marriage. They regarded it as Signorile did, an "archaic" institution. (How many heterosexuals hold that view? More than the aggregate gay population of the USA, would be a conservative estimate.) The sea change happened because average gay men and women wanted to be afforded the same basic dignities that their brothers and sisters never doubted were their entitlement: the right to marry, the right to have a family, the right to serve in the military. The gay intellectual community has by now largely come over to adopting the equal protection argument for gay marriage; the fact that the right to marry is now the single most important issue in gay rights activism only confirms the fact that Signorile's position in 1994, which undoubtedly has changed at least a bit in 10 years, represents a tiny minority among gays.

I think, by the way, that I have already adequately rebutted the Maggiegallagherist one-anecdote-proves-a-sociological-trend methodology. It takes a beautiful mind indeed, and one not at all corrupted by prejudice, to dismiss the vast majority of literature by gay men and women about how obtaining the right to marry is vital to their equality under law, simply because one outlandish and obviously unrepresentative statement "proves" the wicked, subversive plot buried deep in their lavender hearts.