from the NRO's David Klinghoffer -
Link
If everyone were in control of his appetites, there would be no need for the government to be involved in endorsing some sexual relationships while withholding endorsement from others. The more society undermines ancient standards of moral conduct, the harder it becomes to withstand temptation. This is why gay marriage threatens heterosexual marriage. When the awe in which people once held matrimony is diluted, by treating it as a man-made and thus amendable institution rather than a divinely determined one, heterosexuals find sexual sins of all sorts harder to resist.
I don't know about you, but I'm a gay friendly straight man and the rise in gay visibility and gay rights hasn't tempted me to start sucking ----
yet (j/k). Setting aside the fact that straight marriage, which takes place in Las Vegas chapels and reality tv shows and has 50% failure rate, is hardly an object of awe anymore, how do two men or women peacefully cohabitating with partner rights induce me to "sin"?
To me this line of reasoning makes just about as much sense as the marijuana as gateway drug theory. It's not as though after a life in perfectly wedded heterosexual bliss some middle-aged guy is suddenly going to be assaulted by the temptation to fuck somebody other than his wife because the nice interior decorator and his partner up the street seem so stable. The above story only makes sense if there's some pre-existing impulse of the sort that Foley, Haggard, Mayor Jim West and other republican hypocrites have pathologically repressed.
I'm no psychologist, but I believe that this is called projection. The line of thought goes something like this "Those perverted people over there will get their pervert juice on me and make me one of them. They are the ones with the problem, those sickos, not me the repudiator."
I find it odd that for winger's disgust for liberal personality theories that see personhood as a confluence of social or biological forces, these people treat moral agency as an entirely passive affair of reception of, in this case, "errant" community norms. These people then believe that morality has to be defended with state sanctions, lest my poor vulnerable psyche be overrun with queer thoughts from without. It's really a wonderful bit of rhetorical judo.
I know that such a diagnosis is old hat, but I saw this piece of crap on NRO today and I thought that the last time I saw such a big juicy ball right over the plate was in tee-ball. Please pig pile and help me eviscerate this jerk.