Gay Men Married To Women Tell SCOTUS: Don't Demean Our Opposite-Sex Marriages

Mark Joseph Stern writes at Slate:

There are a lot of terrible arguments against same-sex marriage, but this may be the worst: The Supreme Court must not protect gay couples’ marriages, because doing so would demean marriages between gay men and their wives. That, in a nutshell, is the argument put forth in an amicus brief recently filed by a group who call themselves “same-sex attracted men and their wives.” These men don’t claim to have become straight through conversion therapy—though a group of self-proclaimed ex-gays did file their own deeply sad and strange brief. Nor do they claim to be bisexual. Rather, these men admit that they’re “same-sex attracted,” but insist that “a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage can only come at the cost of marginalizing and demeaning the marriages and families” of gay men married to straight women. And that risk, they say, is reason enough for the court to rule against marriage equality.

From the brief:

Underlying petitioners’ appeal is this premise: the right of same-sex attracted men and women to marry a member of the opposite sex is meaningless. That premise underlies petitioners’ equal-protection arguments that man-woman marriage laws “prohibit gay men and lesbians from marrying. Man-woman definitions of marriage can prohibit, foreclose, disqualify, and exclude gay men and lesbians from marriage only if it is impossible or entirely undesirable — that is, meaningless—for same-sex attracted men and women to marry members of the opposite sex. Petitioners do not argue that only some, or even many, gay men and lesbians are prohibited from marrying; they insist, and their arguments depend on their proving, that marriage is foreclosed for all same-sex attracted men and women.

Among the brief's listed "authorities" is Mormon "ex-gay" conversion therapist Josh Weed, who in 2012 wrote a widely-circulated blog post which claimed that he is a happily opposite-married gay man with a "robust sex life" with his wife. Also quoted is homocon nutjob and NOM ally Doug Mainwaring, about whom I've written many times. According to Mainwaring, same-sex marriage will bring about the literal end of human civilization.