Remember the lawyer on “Ally McBeal” who could never say why he was refusing to accept a particular proposal, beyond saying he wasn’t “comfortable” with it?
He could have been the poster child for a lot of the opponents of same-sex marriage — such as newly-independent MP Pat O’Brien. Phyl at Designated Driver of North America recalls O’Brien’s difficulty in explaining his position during a radio interview last year, and takes his logic to its… prickly… conclusion.
In his search for good reasons for his position, O’Brien finally resorted to the age-old red herring of children. Anti-gay advocates love this one. Gay and lesbian relationships can’t produce children, despite the fact that thousands of gays and lesbians DO have children…
It was amusing to me at the time that O’Brien didn’t seem to realize he had also just annulled every childless heterosexual marriage in the nation. And people claim that “activist judges” make law by fiat! Whew. But this is the big flaw in the “can’t have children” argument. You either annul or forbid childless marriages amongst heterosexuals, or you throw this red herring in the trash can once and for all, and stop the extremely stupid attempt to use it against gays and lesbians. It simply IS. NOT. TRUE. These liars should be called on this lie, every bloody time they attempt to use it.
Everything Pat O’Brien tried to use (when he would answer the question at all) to distinguish between his marriage and a marriage between two men fell absolutely flat, and turned out to be false. He simply could not name one reason why a gay marriage is different from his own, and therefore should be forbidden while his own marriage can sail along unquestioned, without scrutiny or justification.
In the end, there is only one thing that Pat O’Brien can use as an excuse for his vehement hatred of the idea of two men getting married: GENITALS.
