Proof? Anti-SSMs Don't Need Proof!

Among the greatest flaws of leftwingers is the intractable belief that reason prevails. You can win your argument and change the position of the nastiest Dark Sider by proving your position intellectually.

Well, triple ha!

As Massachusetts enters into the anti-SSM amendment fight, expect:

• Drive-by character assassination
• Chicken Little bwak-bwak predictions of homosexual-catalyzed apocalypse
• Unsupportable claims of damage to adopted kids
• Total, irrational denial of the intrinsic nature of homosexuality

It appears that at least in the commonwealth, this will be a terrific waste of the voters' time, the taxpayers' money and everyone's emotion.

Politicians don't want to align with the anti-rights forces, particularly as the public sentiment for SSM and SS adoption grows stronger with every poll. The leaders of both sides of the General Court are against stripping a class of citizens of existing rights. There'd be no way to ever explain that one away without a long stretch in rehab first.

Given the almost certain outcome, the great fiscal, temporal and emotional costs, and increasingly painfully obvious irrationality of the anti campaign, there should be a great benefit on the other end of this sewage pipe of political process. One might expect that the anti-rights, anti-gay forces would slink away in shame and that the people and our legislators could devote themselves to worthwhile efforts to better Massachusetts.

We're not counting on those boons. As the amendment battle moves to the commonwealth Constitutional Convention, we expect even more specious and spurious statements from the Dobsons and their ilk.

Recommended Reading: Bay Windows has a superlative piece, Nat'l religious right focuses on Massachusetts on the just-finished training sessions that Focus on the Family had last week. The Colorado-based gay-bashing group has targeted the Massachusetts amendment fight by training campaigners to apply pressure on legislators and officials. It would love to rescind SSM here, and even if it fails, can claim in fund-raising to have fought strongly. Meanwhile, you may pause briefly to wonder in the irony of shipping in the type of outside agitators that the arch-conservatives pretend that the leftwingers always need to bring to a campaign.

You don't have to look far to find scientific proof that same-sex couples are equally good parents as straight ones. Likewise, the proponderance of evidence is that homosexuals are born as such.

Yet, even these two solid conclusions are constantly under emotionally based attack by the anti-forces. They even manage to have a couple of risible pseudo-scientists who claim that they can prove otherwise. The worst and most widely discredited is the Family Research Institute's Dr. Paul Cameron, a former psychologist left in the academic gutter after forsaking his work for political posturing.

He is one form of the anti-gay argument -- finding or producing outlying data and making them suit his conclusions. For example, he has taken small subsets of known promiscuous gay subcultures and extrapolated their behavior to all homosexuals, even long-term monogamous couples. His ah-ha! moments are really more of oh-yeah? ones.

The other form, the one we expect to hear more of here is the it's-only-common-sense one. For those who just cannot exercise logic or show compassion so long as homosexuals are involved, they fall back on pretending that their a priori feelings are equal to actual observation, science and reasoning.

There may be little to do for either type. On the other hand, those little armies of spite dwindle as they meet and come to know homosexuals, particularly gay parents. Nationwide, support for SSM and gay adoption is steadily increasing. In the commonwealth, SSM seems to have accelerated that. It's hard to make your neighbor or co-worker the other.

Other Reading:

• See some of the absurd and twisted logic against SSM and gay adoption, with Cameron as a primary source in Crisis Magazine, bigotry by and for Catholics.
• The Baptist Press' dismissal of decades of science supporting the healthy nature of SS adoption, with the American Psychological Association "is just one more organization that has been co-opted by homosexual activists."
• In contrast, massive, long-term studies that prove "(t)he vast consensus of all the studies shows that children of same-sex parents do as well as children whose parents are heterosexual in every way." You can find numerous scientific reports that support the health of SS couples, many data going back 30 or more years.