HomoQuotable - Robert Oscar Lopez

"There is no contest here. The child comes first. In any ethically grounded discussion, same-sex marriage is dead on arrival. Why, then, are we still having a debate about same-sex marriage? Why is Hollingsworth even an issue? The problem is metaphor, which keeps getting in the way. Whatever same-sex marriage is, that’s not what gays are after. They are after a symbolic vehicle that can make them equal to people who can do something they cannot—procreate. The tenuousness of this equivalence, in fact its near impossibility, makes the fight for same-sex marriage even more metaphorically desperate. Faced with the prospect that nothing a same-sex couple does will ever approximate the uncomplicated triangular bond among child, mother, and father, the activists deflect attention away from the child's rights toward the rights of gay adults again and again. As long as the focus is on gays, a wealth of metaphors, especially the notion that gay is the new black, can shield the gay activist from inevitable scrutiny about the effects of his demands on children." - Homocon activist Robert Oscar Lopez, writing for Public Discourse.  Last month Lopez filed a joint Supreme Court brief against the overturn of Proposition 8.

RELATED: JMG reader Straight Grandmother points us to a response essay from former LGBT rights foe David Blankenhorn, who has engaged Maggie Gallagher rather forcefully in the comments.  Blankenhorn writes:

I am repulsed by what Lopez says and the way he says it. To me, his voice is the voice of the fanatic, the denouncer of others, the accuser, the utterly self-confident dogmatist who wants to pound us all, in party by the sheer vehemence of his language, into accepting whatever doctrine he is insisting on. I read him with care, and I find some nuggets of truth, including some that are troubling to me now (in a good way), but in him I find no wisdom, no maturity, no way of seeing the world that reminds me in any way of our shared humanity or the complexity and mystery of the human condition. I do not a trust a voice of this type on anything that truly matters to me.