Hugo’s in one of his blocking-critical-comments moods, so I’m putting a somewhat expanded version of my response to this post here.

Hugo:

…it’s not nit-picking to challenge Ensign and Lopez on their language. Both are ardent culture warriors, fighting against the cause of marriage equality for all. Both are willing to employ biblical language as tools in that fight. I count myself a Christian and a culture warrior as well, though from the opposite side of the lists; it is indeed fair sport to point out that one’s deeply misguided (but no doubt charming) opponents are — out of ignorance or malice I know not — misusing Scriptural language and misrepresenting the role of marriage in the Judeo-Christian narrative.

My bold.

Hugo (and many gay marriage advocates) would like to pretend that they are in favor of “marriage equality for all”. Equality is such a nice thing to ask for. It’s not a privilege, or a redefinition of terms – it’s just asking for equality. Treat me the same as you treat them!

But for 99% of the people making it, a claim to believe in “marriage equality for all” is a blatant lie. Hugo is lying when he claims to be in favor of “marriage equality for all”. He is not. It’s an obvious falsehood.

Instead, he is in favor of keeping our current, exclusionist, model of marriage completely intact – but allowing one category of people denied their matrimonial preferences to come within the boundaries of exclusion. Gay two-person relationships, along with straight two-person relationships, shall be allowed/recognized.

But that isn’t marriage equality for all. Imagine that it was still the bad old days of 1920, when racial and religious prejudice was far more pervasive and severe than it is today. Imagine that you are a Jewish high school student, applying for admission to an Ivy League institution. Well, good luck with that – in those bad old days, there were stark and strict quotas to keep Jews out of these institutions. So your application is denied with prejudice. So you start campaigning for a revocation of the anti-Jewish quotas, and you win. Have you been fighting for “college admission equality for all”? No. You haven’t done anything for blacks, or women, or Hispanics, or Asians, or any of a number of other people who were excluded just as firmly from the institution as the Jews. You’ve been fighting for a parochial interest – a good and worthy interest, to be sure, but your fight was on behalf of, and benefited, a particular group of people. You weren’t a college-admission-universalist; you wanted to stop the mistreatment of one particular group.

And there’s nothing at all wrong with that, of course; nobody says you have to fight all the evil of the world at the same time for it to count. At the same time, it’s somewhat self-serving to make gassy claims about how you’re fighting for everyone, if you aren’t. It’s more than self-serving to make that claim while simultaneously believing that the discrimination against blacks, women, Hispanics, etc. are still good things.

Gay rights campaigners are not polyamory campaigners. They are not campaigning for the rights of incestuous couples. They are not campaigning for the “rights” of young teenagers to marry. They tacitly or explicitly endorse the many restrictions that our society has put on marriage, except for the one restriction which is of personal interest to them. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Believe what you believe, and fight for it.

But spare the rest of us the sanctimonious pretense that you’re in a fight for some beautiful abstract ultimate principle. When Hugo is out there yelling at the Mormon Church for its cruel treatment of polygamists, then he can credibly claim to be fighting for “marriage equality for all”. As it is, he’s just lying to make himself feel special. “Oh what a good person I am, believing in marriage equality for all! What kind of monster must my enemies be, these people who do not believe in marriage equality for all!”

For the sake of Hugo’s fragile ego, let’s hope the disconnect between his rhetoric and what he actually believes continues to elude the cognitive part of his brain.