Of Note

First, a couple of good posts by David Link at Independent Gay Forum, one about the Prop 8 trial and the arguments the supporters have at their disposal, and one about religion and sex.

And Timothy Kincaid has one at BTB on the real reason the Church opposes gay marriage.

Looking at these again, they really do all tie together. Kincaid notes an article by Deacon Keith Fournier in Catholic Online. The core of Kincaid's piece is the demand that heterosexual relationships continue to receive favored status. Quoting Fournier:

They want the State to treat homosexual partnerships as the equivalent of marriage, thereby denying real marriage and the family founded upon it, the favored legal place it has long held as the first society.

That is telling enough, but I want to point out the very first sentence of Fournier's sadly slanted commentary on the Jenkins/Miler custody case:

This tragic custody case sets up what is called a conflict of laws issue, pitting the law of one State against another as a part of a homosexual advocacy agenda.

Right off the bat, I'd like to point out that this is not the situation at all: the court in Virginia has agreed to abide by the decisions of the Vermont court in this case, which at this point is that the child, Isabella, should be in the sole custody of Janet Jenkins. Lisa Miller has taken Isabella and disappeared. This piece is so scurrilous that I was moved to leave a comment, in which I was unfortunately only able to scrape the surface of the cesspool. The gist is that this Catholic deacon is coming out strongly in support of a woman who shows no moral compass herself, has reneged on her contractual obligations and disobeyed a court order to observe them. This hit-man thinks this is praiseworthy behavior.

The core of this, of course, is anti-gay bias. This is brought sharply to light by Link's second post, which has a very entertaining section on how acceptance of gays as real people is an assault on Christianity:

The CADC insists that the mere presence of openly gay people is not just wrong or even intolerable, but an attack on Christianity. And the fact that other Christian religions accept openly gay people is, itself, a further affront, an exacerbating act of prejudice and defamation against the non-accepting.

The key issue, of course, is same-sex marriage. I've been over the "arguments" (see -- we can use quotes, too) against, and Link makes an important point on this in regard to the Prop 8 trial:

But the rejection of a constitutional principle for a very small minority, a principle that is generally applicable to everyone in the majority, is not only not the solution to the problem being presented, it is, itself, the problem which the equal protection clause was supposed to address. Why would an equal protection clause be necessary if it was only there to protect the majority?

The Prop. 8 case will be addressing that question head-on, and the witnesses opposing same-sex marriage will have to present the kind of arguments that the New Jersey senators were not obligated to offer. The question is a focused one: What justification does the government have for treating same-sex couples and opposite sex couples differently in light of the fact that the federal constitution does include a provision that explicitly says all citizens should be treated equally under the law?

The fact that we have historically discriminated between those groups is not an argument. The fact that many voters have a predisposition to favor their own relationships at the expense of the minority’s is not an argument.

Finally, and most importantly, the fact that many religions believe that homosexuality is a sin is also not an argument – or at least not one the court will be able to properly assess. There are many religions and many theologians who think homosexuality is not a sin. No secular court could competently resolve that theological dispute. Nor should it. Ours are not religious courts, and the damage they would do if given the authority to decide what is sin and what is not, what God intends for us and what he (or she) does not is immeasurable.

I suggest you read all three posts, and even Deacon Fournier's screed (on an empty stomach, that one). They make some good points.