It seems a bit strange to be turning this book blog into “the gay marriage channel,” but it seems that’s the way current events are trending.

Barely a week after my own father married two men back in Canada, a court here in California ruled that the voter-backed ban on gay marriage in California, the notorious Proposition 8, is unconstitutional.

The play-by-play has been done to death so I won’t get into it here, but suffice it to say that in spite of an election year that saw a Democratic sweep of Congress and the election of America’s first black President, this retrograde bit of referendum-style balloting still managed to win — partly thanks to a firehose of money and effort by the Mormon Church, a subject capably covered in a documentary recently released on DVD.

What always amazes me, though, is in spite of all the millions spent and ideological certainty put forth by gay marriage opponents… well, not one of them has ever come out and actually explained why gay marriage in any way “weakens” families or the traditional institution of marriage. We get the usual silly platitudes about “the Bible says so” (it really doesn’t) or “soon people will be asking to marry their dogs” (the notion that consenting adults in love is what’s at issue seems to have escaped them). But analysis? I’ve looked everywhere for it, and aside from a passing mention in some Wall Street Journal piece some years back about fluctuating divorce rates in the Netherlands, have found not a single shred of evidence, anywhere that allowing gay people to marry will in any way weaken existing marriages, harm children, or other jeremiads that issue forth from the religious right.

I move that, just like Germany has banned public expressions of Nazism from the post-World War II German state, that any bans on gay marriage be require to call themselves just that — “gay marriage bans.” No obfuscating language about focusing on families or protecting sacred institutions or other misleading nomenclature that probably helped Prop 8 win passage (and even with that, narrow passage at best). It’s time that bigotry and narrow-mindedness be forced to call itself what it is.

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