There’s a pretty interesting video making the rounds this week in which Bill O’Reilly has a guest on who opposes gay marriage, and O’Reilly asks him - well, why do you oppose gay marriage - and the guy simply can’t come up with anything coherent. And O’Relly sort of gets on the guy’s case. Which, if you stop and think about it, is pretty amazing.

Sullivan writes that it feels like a tipping point - then follows up with something I’ve said on several occasions, though not so succinctly:

Once you accept that gay people are gay in the way that straight people are straight, and once you remove purely religious arguments from a secular debate, the case against marriage equality simply collapses. One reason I have been so eager to have this debate on rational grounds is that, if reason is your guide, the pro-gay side wins overwhelmingly. What’s left is a base-line argument for caution.

And caution is warranted, I think.

At the same time, though, I suspect it’s impossible for some to remove religous arguments from the debate. That’s why the debate always goes the way it does; I might argue from a purely rational point of view, but rationality is only one of the factors influencing those who dislike gay marriage on religious grounds, and often isn’t the most important factor. If you wholeheartedly believe that gay marriage is immoral, you look in the Bible to find the passages that condemn homosexuality and buttress your own feelings (and please don’t say that you wouldn’t harbor those feelings if it weren’t for those scant passages, because that isn’t true, is it? If those passages didn’t exist, would you feel differently about homosexuality?) And because you then find confirmation of the things you feel in your gut in your Good Book, that is rational for you. That is part of the debate.

…except that in a secular society, the legal case isn’t to be based upon that. And there’s the rub. There has to be a secular case against gay marriage, but there really isn’t one; or if there is, all it is is an admonishment to go slow. The rest of it rests on these vague assertions of how this will “harm” the family and communities, when in fact the opposite is probably true. But so long as religion is the primary motivation for opposing gay marriage, the opposite cannot be true. And we must not even consider the possibility.