Hi, I'm from the Family Research Council, and our Research indicates that your Family is evil.

Currently involved in America's politics are two outfits called the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council. It would be natural to assume that these groups would have fairly broad bases of support for ideals relating to marriages and families. It would be natural, but it would be wrong, because of how these people's support for 'marriage' and 'family' is calibrated.

Here is a hint: Their support for such things is almost always based on their support for their marriages and their families. This is perfectly natural and even admirable, since it shows that they are to at least some extent grounded in a reality that they can perceive rather than high-flown ideologies alone. It only becomes problematic when you realise why these people like their own marriages and families.

They love their spouses and families, essentially, for the same reason that one might love a myna bird.

As long as Maggie Gallagher's marriage continues to be heterosexual and as long as Tony Perkins's family continues to be whitebread, they'll support them, and hence 'marriage' and 'family' in general, because they define marriage and family in terms of their own experience without any caring for what other people's marriages or other people's families might be like. But the second one thing goes awry--the second Maggie Gallagher interacts with a married couple who are the same sex, or of different ideologies or backgrounds, or in any other way noticeably different from her own--the mask collapses. And if Tony Perkins was suddenly in a world in which one of his children was gay, or had leftist sympathies, or was forced to drop out of high school to have her rapist's baby, then I don't doubt that he'd turn on them and everything they cared about, like Alan Keyes did with his lesbian daughter. I have seen this happen with very conservative families again and again, and in my view one of the saving graces of very conservative families, the way that you can tell that the members of a particular very conservative family really love each other, are a real family, and mean serious business with their love, is them not doing this if the situation arises. (This is, for instance, the one thing that, if anything will, could possibly lead Dick Cheney to redemption.)

I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-the-top. I genuinely think that this is how venal, self-serving, hypocritcal, and bigoted these people's reasons for supporting 'marriage' and 'family' as concepts are. I know that they outright oppose gay people's marriages and gay people's families and hate their members and want them to go away and be miserable and die. I don't doubt that many of them have similar feelings on interracial marriages--after all, one of the only interracial couples in the Bible was also lesbian--or extended families--giving a shit about anybody whose relation to you can't be easily explained with 'I had sex with X' is DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO COMMUNISM, obviously--or anything else that forces them to remember that 'marriage' and 'family' aren't concepts that their marriages and their families have a global fucking monopoly over, that people who aren't like them exist, that other types of love exist, and that they have to share the world with other living things that have loved ones and human relationships just like they do.

It's worse than bigotry. It's a desire for outright and absolute control over what constitutes marriage, what constitutes family, and, in the end, what constitutes love.

Please, for all that's good and holy, with the love of your marriage (if you have one) and your family (we all have our family, whatever that may be), resist them. Resist them, for the good of America, and for the good of love.