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05/28/2014
This is called discrimination: Maggie Gallagher will sacrifice support for marriage if it is to include gay people
Maggie Gallagher acknowledges that marriage, in general, is troubled and claims she'd like to stabilize it. But here's her line in the sand:
“If supporting marriage requires us to support gay marriage, we cannot do this”
—National Organization For Marriage co-founder Maggie Gallagher speaking to National Catholic Register
Which sounds pretty much like a kid saying she's going to take her ball and go home. And it also tells you pretty much all you need to know about Gallagher's priorities.
Look, she doesn't approve of my marriage. She dislikes it. She wishes it weren't so. I get it. She's made that quite clear, even going so far as to say that people who support marriage equality are committing very serious sins as well. She's a Catholic who prioritizes certain stones. Opposing same-sex marriage is the mission she sees for her life. I get it. I couldn't care less, frankly—but I get it.
But even so, if Maggie were truly committed to helping the culture of marriage, like she claims to be, then now is the time when she would look both within herself and at the America that she unwittingly helped to shape (because let's be clear: Maggie's terrible and robotically stated arguments against the freedom to marry helped us get to our destination sooner), and she would find some way to move beyond the disaster that is her legacy in American politics. Maggie Gallagher's career is attached to something that history will remember to be wasteful, discriminatory, hostile and regressive. As of now, her work will be remembered as a public nuisance, not a public good. She put herself out there in a really big way, and she failed spectacularly. The only way she can get beyond that is to actually start focus on work that does, in fact, help others. She doesn't have to recognize the strength and worth of my marriage and family, if that is a place of negativity that she wants to hold onto in her heart and mind, but she could at least do something that more than her most ardent supporters (and even they're dwindling, you can be sure) recognize as a worthwhile endeavor that actually helps better our marriage culture. As it stands, she has very little positive work to back her "pro-marriage" claims.
Look, marriage equality is here forever. It's ours, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. That's a fact. Period. And while I do not suspect for even one second that Maggie Gallagher will become any less hostile toward my marriage than she is today—and again, I really could not give a flying flapjack less about her firmly-held opinion—I do know that if she wants to be part of the marriage culture and work on its behalf, then she's at the very least going to have to acknowledge what is an increasing and soon to be sweeping reality. She is not going to be able to keep saying she supports marriage in America when she so readily and proudly denies so many legal, tangible, thriving American marriages.
I mean, she can carry on as she has. But it's only going to make her look even more discriminatory. Which maybe she's fine with; I don't know, I'm really losing interest.
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