[Ghoulish Delight]

On a slight tangent, I spent an ill advised amount of time in the trenches over at Change.gov in the comments section.

First off, it was a pleasant surprise to see that the level of discourse there was well above average for blog comment threads. Well above. Even at its nastiest, people remained relatively civil and well spoken, on both sides.

What was particularly gratifying, though, was that the people defending the selection, and ultimately defending the ban on gay marriage, were doing a great job of proving my point for me, namely that opposition of same sex marriage is rooted in religious dogma and nothing else. Here is how every single one of the conversations I got into over there proceeded:

Me (or some other like minded commenter): Angry at the choice of Warren
Defender: You're not being inclusive. Besides, he's just defending his beliefs. [insert bad analogy that equates supporting same-sex marriage with preventing religious freedom]
Me: Actually, no, Warren's free to believe whatever he wants still, he's just not free to legislate it
Defender: ....Oh yeah? Well God said gays are icky!
Me: That's nice. Good thing god didn't write the Constitution. Not a basis for law. Thanks for playing.
Defender: ............

Over and over again in various forms, the most common alternate form being, "Marriage has always been that way!" leading to the simple miscegenation rebutal. Without fail, no matter how rational they were trying to be, they all eventually had to fall back on, "Oh yeah, well God said so!" And once I called them on that, they never responded.

It was frustrating to see so many people willing to legislate religious doctrine. But it was comforting to see in practice what I had known in theory, that when pressed, religious doctrine is all they have to stand on. And that when you finally force them to face the fact that they're trying to get "God said so" into the constitution, they shut up.