Natale Davis over at All Facts points me to a post over at the Christian Science Monitor "Patchwork Nation" blog about recent events on the same-sex marriage front.  Patchwork Nation is an interesting project…

About the Patchwork Nation project

The United States is a vast, diverse place – more than 300 million people spread over 3.5 million square miles. Yet our understanding of its complexities is limited. We think of demographic slices or broad regions, or we fall back on the overused, oversimplified ideas of red and blue America.

Patchwork Nation, funded by the Knight Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic organization based in Miami, is designed to help us get past those views and understand how different communities and cultures within the US experience different realities – and shape the whole.

So the blog post in question grabs snapshots of opinions from each of their representative communities thusly…

In Los Alamos, N.M., our wealthy and educated “Monied ’Burb,” there doesn’t seem to be much of a gay marriage “issue.”

“Our legislature introduced a bill allowing gay marriage. It died in committee,” says Bill Enloe, chairman and CEO of Los Alamos National Bank, in an e-mail. But he also writes, “The majority of individuals in the state are in favor of allowing gay marriage. It might pass next year.”

Kevin Holsapple, executive director of the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce, e-mailed that he had “never perceived it to be an issue” in the city.

In Lincoln City, Ore., our small-town “Service Worker Center,” some in the community are focused on the topic, according to Patchwork Nation blogger Kip Ward, who runs a local hotel. However, “For most of us, we have bigger fish to fry,” he says in an e-mail. “We just don’t bother with it one way or the other.”

In Ann Arbor, Mich., our liberal “Campus and Careers” community, one correspondent succinctly e-mailed, “Gay marriage should be a nonissue.”

And in Nixa, Mo., our socially conservative “Evangelical Epicenter,” local retiree Betty Ann Rogers wrote that she hadn’t really heard about the issue or read about it in the newspaper.

…but what gets my attention is a comment left by a reader from Massachusetts:

Here in Massachusetts, so little is different that you’d not know that we were the first state to legalize gay marriage, if you didn’t make an effort to ‘turn the rocks over’ or ‘kick the logs’ a bit. Those gay and lesbian couples who wanted to marry have done so…and settled down into quiet, integrated parts of the communities in which they live. They pay taxes, support churches, do community service work, and just generally help their areas be better places. You’d never know that there had been a ‘country-shaking’, ‘ground-breaking’ event here by the quietness of it all. My marriage fell apart not because some of my gay and lesbian friends married their partners, but because of my own failings (or those of my ex). I think that as things march forward, people will come to see that that their own relationships are not, in any way, controlled or affected by those around them, gay or straight, and that tolerance and quiet, friendly support for happy couples is much, much better for our society overall than is angry divisiveness. 

Emphasis mine.  This is why Every Single Battle in this fight has been to the death.  Because once people see they’ve been lied to about the Homosexual Menace, the whole house of cards falls apart.  It isn’t society sliding into sexual anarchy the homophobes have been afraid of.  It’s the see-it-with-your-own-two-eyes realization that bringing same sex couples into the fold actually strengthens communities that they never, at any cost, wanted people to behold.

For generations they have put knives into our hearts so they could feel righteous.  For generations they have taken what should be one of this life’s most perfect joys…falling in love, and being loved in return…and turned it into a nightmare for this one small portion of the human family.  They did it so they wouldn’t have to look at the barren wasteland they’d made of their own stone cold hearts.  They did it so they could have scapegoats for every cheapshit character flaw of their own.  They turned their gay neighbors into monsters, so they wouldn’t have to confront the monsters staring back at them in the bathroom mirror.  Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker have been staring in wonder at the depth of the fear in Rod Dreher’s writing on the subject of same-sex marriage.  But they have it all wrong.  It isn’t change Dreher is afraid of.  It isn’t the fear that civilization may slide into sexual anarchy that grips him.  It’s being held responsible for all those thousands upon thousands of broken hearts and murdered hopes and dreams.  Why did they do it?  Why?  Why was it necessary to put a knife into the hearts of so many innocent people?  Ultimately, we may never know precisely why.  Why do people hate?  Why does hate have such power over some of us, and not others?  Can we ever really answer that question?  But you need to understand what Dreher and his kind fear isn’t the Homosexual Menace, or Sexual Anarchy or The Fall Of Western Civilization, but that common, decent people will stop seeing monsters when they look at their gay neighbors, and instead see who the real monsters were in this unmitigated human tragedy.

There’s the fear.  There’s the bottomless fear.  Right there.