A. Barton Hinkle writes an editorial over at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, that makes an argument many gay conservatives have been making for years. 

Gay marriage is banned in France. But about a decade ago, France’s Socialist government created a compromise — a civil solidarity pact, known by its French acronym PACS — as a form of quasi-marriage for homosexual couples.

This is France’s equivalent to the so-called "civil unions" that exist in some U.S. states.  And naturally, France’s right wingers denounced it as a cheapening of marriage.  But it was a cheapening they’d had a hand in creating, by their dogged resistance to letting same sex couples simply marry.  PACS were seen to be a compromise, just as they are here in the United States, between the needs of gay couples and the hatred of homophobes. 

Then, as Hinkle puts it, a funny thing happened.  Large numbers of straight couples started opting for PACS, too…

MARRIAGE IN France has been on the skids for years. The French marriage rate has fallen more than 30 percent in the past generation. Marriage has been declining in other European countries as well, but in France the slope has been steeper. By 2005, 59 percent of all first-born children in France were born out of wedlock. More and more French couples live in "free unions," or what Americans might think of as nonbinding common-law marriages. They simply shack up, often for life.

Now France’s experience with PACS helps clarify a very muddled point in the debate over gay marriage here in America.  Social conservatives commonly argue against gay marriage for a multiplicity of (often dubious) reasons, from the necessity to protect children to the importance of subsidizing procreation. But perhaps the most often cited reason is that gay unions threaten the "institution" of marriage.

How, precisely, they do so is not intuitively clear. No one seriously argues that a marriage between John and Steve somehow undermines the bonds of affection that keep Ted and Amy together. Nor is it clear how encouraging homosexuals, who sometimes are condemned for libertine promiscuity, to enter a contract requiring lifelong fidelity weakens the appeal of lifelong fidelity.

So opponents of gay marriage fall back on the idea that letting gay people marry somehow cheapens the currency — as though a marriage between Ted and Amy weighs less in the cosmic scales because John and Steve have entered into a similar contract. That is akin to the argument that letting gay people open bank accounts weakens the institution of banking.

FRANCE’S EXPERIENCE teaches a different lesson. It is not gay marriage, but the attempt to deny gays the chance to participate in marriage, that has cheapened the currency and further imperiled the institution. By creating a second-class — call it a "subprime" — form of marriage, France gave both gays and straights a watered-down option that let people enjoy all the privileges with none of the obligations…

…and then, he puts his finger on the heart of it:

And that points to the real issue at the heart of the argument about marriage as an institution. To say that letting gay people marry cheapens the currency of marriage holds true only if gay people have less intrinsic worth than straight people — just as the argument against interracial marriage, that it would lead to the "mongrelization of the human race," made sense only to those who saw blacks as less than human.

To let gay people enter into sacred matrimony, then, requires recognizing something sacred within them…

There’s the problem.  How do you recognize it when from nearly every pulpit in America gay people are called abominations in the eyes of God?  How do you recognize it when in one statehouse after another gay people are called a bigger threat to America then terrorists?

You can’t.  You don’t.  You are incapable.  They are not human beings.  They are some strange, alien, dangerous, evil other.  There is nothing at all sacred in them. You are not putting a knife in their hearts, because they have no human heart.  Only degenerate lust.  You are defending the dignity and the honor of your love, against the animal passions of sub-humans that threaten to devour it.

There can be no dialogue as long as we are not human.  There just can’t.  Only war.  We have seen time and time again how we appeal to our common humanity and we get slammed in return with one filthy lie after another, after another after another.  We hold out our hand in fellowship and our enemies jump at us like a pack of pit bulls.  As long as we are not human, they will continue to put their knifes into our hearts and put their wreaking balls to the lives we try to make for ourselves, and call it self defense.  And we, because we are human, will continue to fight back.  Because we must.  Because the only alternative is to live with the knife and the wreaking ball.  And it will never end.  Until the day comes that they can finally look at us, and see human beings. 

How to make that day come, I honestly don’t know.  Large swaths of the U.S. still cannot look at a black man and see a human being either.  Or a red one.  Or a brown one.  Or a yellow one.  Too many U.S. males still seem to think that the female half of the human race is sub-human…good only for making babies and cooking dinner.  How do you fight that?  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that a bigot’s mind is like an eye…the more light you shine on it the tighter it closes.  But for the sake of our common future, our survival as a species, those eyes have to open.

I have no idea how to make that happen.  But I know this full well: until they do, this fight will never end.  It will only grow more bitter, more damaging, more violent.   The word people are choking on in the fight isn’t "marriage".  It’s "homosexual".  And we are not only being preventing from marrying because of it.  We are targets…

"A 4-pound stone, one of several door stops hurled at patrons in a bar that includes gay people among its clientele, left one man with 12 staples in the back of his head and two brothers and an acquaintance accused of a hate crime. Marc Bosaw, 57, said Monday he has little recollection of the Sunday night attack, in which police said one suspect held open the door to Robert’s Lafitte bar while two others launched an assault shortly after 8 p.m. Bosaw sat at the corner of the bar at 2501 Ave. Q just a few feet from one of two entryway doors. ‘I thought I had just been slapped, and the second rock hit me here,’ Bosaw said of the mark on his hand. ‘Everything went white in my mind, and I thought that was it. I even said ‘goodbye.’’ The barrage also hit another patron, James Nickelson, 39, who police listed as a Houston resident, but bar patrons said Monday they believed he had recently moved to the island."

Other bar patrons reportedly struggled to keep Bosaw conscious before he was transported to a regional medical center.

The Houston Chronicle reports: "The three men fled, but were apprehended by police about 10 blocks from the bar, Alvarez said. They were then brought back to the bar, where witnessses identified them. One of the men arrested told police they targeted the establishment because it was a gay bar, Alvarez said. All three men were charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon along with hate crime charges. They are being held on a combined bond of $120,000."According to the Galveston News, "Bonds for Lawrence Henry Lewis III, 20, Lawrneil Henry Lewis, 18, and Alejandro Sam Gray, 17, all of Galveston, were set at $120,000 each on two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon with the enhancement of a hate crime, said Lt. D.J. Alvarez, a Galveston police spokesman."

Robert’s Lafitte became a place of refuge after Hurricane Ike, providing food and water for locals in need.

…because we are a bigger threat then terrorists…

Following a series of recent gay bashings in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, people took to the streets over the weekend for a "Take Back the Night" rally meant to send a signal to those perpetuating violence against the city’s LGBT community.

KOMO news reports: "The latest attack came a week ago near 13th Avenue and Columbia Street, about a block from the Seattle University campus. Forty-one-year-old Jerry Knight was on his way home when two men confronted him. And now he says the horror of that weekend might always haunt him. ‘I remember being hit hard, where I fell and my hands were bruised falling directly on the ground,’ he said Saturday in an interview. He acknowledges it could have been worse.’I am grateful,’ he says. ‘I am grateful I did not wake up in the hospital. I am grateful I am not in a coffin. I know that, and honor that.’ He says he was attacked by two men as he walked home alone in the early morning hours. The assault was first reported online by The Stranger newspaper."

…because we are abominations in the eyes of God…

In March 2007, Skipper’s body was found by the side of a rural road in central Florida with more than 20 stab wounds. His car and laptop had been stolen. The car was abandoned and recovered by authorites, who reported that the assailants had attempted to set it on fire but did not succeed. They had also cut out a seat belt because it was so bloody they couldn’t clean it. Bearden, then 21, and William David Brown Jr., then 20, were later arrested and indicted for the killing. A witness brought in by authorities at the time told police that Brown had killed Skipper because he was gay.

Bearden’s co-defendant, William Brown, is to be tried at a later date on charges of first-degree murder and robbery.

Bearden was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 25 years.

…because we are not human….

Blabbeando: "27 year old Isaac Ali Dani Peréz Triviño was born in Spain. 32 year old Julio Anderson Luciano was born in Brazil. They lived together in the Spanish province of Vigo and were planning to get married. Both were stabbed to death by Jacobo Piñeiro Rial in their apartment in the early morning of January 13th, 2006. The bodies showed a total of 57 stab wounds, according to forensics. After killing them, Piñeiro took a shower and cleaned himself up. He filled a suitcase with some of their belongings to make it look like a robbery and then spilled clothing all over the place. He poured alcohol over everything, including his victims’ bodies, turned on the gas spigot on the stove, and set everything on fire. The local fire department said that little evidence would have survived if it wasn’t for their prompt response to the 5-alarm fire"

The jury bought the killer’s ‘gay panic’ defense…

This fight isn’t about marriage.  It was never about marriage.  It has always been about our human status.  The sacred is within us too.  But you have to want to see it.  That is the problem.  That is the only problem.