by Steve Timmer

Dec 20, 2012, 7:00 AM

Bigots hold confab!

What do we do now?

There is a story on Hot Dish politics about the regrouping of the anti-gay marriage forces to gird their loins and prepare for the legislative session. Among the sessions planned is Why Did We Light the Exploding Cigar? Katherine Kersten was expected to lead that one.

[Update: Loins girded, Joel Adkins said:

“We anticipate that the Legislature will move to redefine marriage, most likely this year, which is one principal reason why Minnesota needed a marriage amendment,” said Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference. Adkins is also the Catholic church’s principal lobbyist at the Capitol.

The proffered amendment, and the party that advanced it, were defeated in November. The amendment was defeated 2 to 1 where I live. Adkins like to say that the amendment carried the day in most counties, but the last time I checked, deer and pine trees don’t vote.]

In figuring what is really afoot here, though, consider a remarkable document authored recently by Pope Benedict for the World Day of Peace on January 1st. Here’s part of what the pope says, via ThinkProgress:

There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union. Such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.

These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity. The Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation.

Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.

[emphasis by ThinkProgress]

The defense of “traditional marriage” has featured several arguments over the last few years. If you have read Katherine Kersten’s commentaries, you’ve been able to listen to them waft by in the effluvium. The one that the antis have seemed to have fixed on recently, though, is the one made by the pope above, apparently because the straight-up Leviticus crap wasn’t exactly reeling them in. It isn’t really a religious matter, after all, says the pope:

Why, it’s just against human nature!

Here’s Katherine Kersten last Sunday, making the same argument:

In reality, men and women complement one another physically, socially and emotionally in the bearing and rearing of children. Fathers, for example, tend to encourage risk-taking and independence, while mothers nurture, soothe hurt feelings and often have more trouble “letting go.” [   ]

But who died and made the pope the Great Sociologist? It is sort of like when another Pope Benedict was the Great Astronomer and told Galileo he was full of it and better toe the line.

But if you wan to see what a real factual record on the subject of gay marriage’s effect on society looks like, I commend Judge Vaughn Walker’s opinion – recently upheld by the Ninth Circuit – invalidating California’s Proposition 8. If you are in a hurry, you might start at about page 73 of the opinion. See especially Finding 48.

So here’s your choice: Pope Benedict looking wistfully off into the distance, humming I’ve Got a Feeling, and Katherine Kersten faithfully repeating whatever the pope says, OR the unanimous judgment of serious scientists that gay attraction is real and legitimate and just as deserving of societal protection as heterosexual marriage, and that homosexual couples are just as capable of raising children, and in fact do.

When you’re down to the “human nature” argument without any real evidence, it’s no different than saying it ain’t natural for brown people to sit at lunch counters with white people, for blacks and whites to marry, or for women to vote. It’s simple bigotry.