Theo Hobson, writing in the Comment Is Free section of the Guardian Online, makes an interesting argument as to why the fight over gay rights is different from others.  He’s speaking to the struggle within various religious denominations, but he could just as well be speaking to the fight in society as a whole…

What emerged from the gay adoption business is that the issue of homosexuality is terribly dangerous to the Roman Catholic church. It comes away from such a debate with its public image damaged. And of course this is true of the Anglican Church too. Indeed, it seems to me that the debate about homosexuality poses such a serious threat to organised religion in this country that it is not absurd to compare it to the reformation of the 16th century.

Some will reply that the churches have always faced difficult moral issues, and they have muddled through: the gay issue is nothing unusual. Until quite recently I would have agreed. But it becomes ever clearer that the issue of homosexuality really is different. It has managed to tie the finest Anglican theologian of his generation in knots, effectively disabling him from leadership. And more widely and more seriously it is undermining the churches’ claim to the moral high ground.

…

Firstly, this is an issue that shuns compromise. It has a stark "either/or" quality. Either homosexuality is a fully valid alternative to heterosexuality or it is not. There is no room for compromise, no third way: poor Rowan Williams is trying to make himself a perch on a barbed-wire fence. You don’t find such absoluteness in other moral debates, such a complete absence of shared assumptions and aims.

I think you do, and the obvious example of it is the fight over abortion.  But here’s the critical difference, even with that bitter struggle:

The public change in attitudes towards homosexuality is not just the waning of a taboo. It is not just a case of a practice losing its aura of immorality (as with premarital sex or illegitimacy). Instead, the case for homosexual equality takes the form of a moral crusade. Those who want to uphold the old attitude are not just dated moralists (as is the case with those who want to uphold the old attitude to premarital sex or illegitimacy). They are accused of moral deficiency. The old taboo surrounding this practice does not disappear but "bounces back" at those who seek to uphold it. Such a sharp turn-around is, I think, without parallel in moral history.

These factors have combined to make the gay issue the church’s perfect storm, perhaps even its nemesis. Because previous shifts in public morality have been slower, and more amenable to compromise, the Church has been able to move its clunky stone feet, and keep standing. This shift has floored it. By resisting the new moral orthodoxy on homosexuality, and hardening against it, the church is fast losing the aura of moral authority it has more or less retained all this time. When a bishop defends discrimination against homosexuals he is, in the eyes of most of the population, displaying a lamentable moral deficiency.

So the issue of homosexuality has the strange power to turn the moral tables. The traditional moralist is subject to accusations of immorality. And this inversion is doing terrible damage to the Christian churches.

(Emphasis mine) And there it is.  At least in the abortion fight, there are two plausibly moral sides to it, that of concern for the life of the unborn, verses concern for the lives of women.  And there is a more general question of who decides how your own body is to be used.  But in arguments over homosexuality, there is only the judgment that same sex relationships are either damaging in some way, damaging enough to justify acting against them, or they are not.  You can take a stand for the rights of women to decide for themselves how and when to give birth, and still be forced to concede that the other side in the fight may well feel compelled to fight for the lives of the unborn, even against the lives of the living.  You can disagree with it, you can disagree profoundly with it, but there it is.  But in the case of homosexuality, there is only the damage that is done to gay people.  Either homosexuality is destructive or it is not.  And if it is not, then what have you been doing all this time to homosexual people?  Every same sex relationship torn asunder is either two souls saved, or two loving hearts cut to ribbons. 

One side in this fight, has a lot of human misery and grief to answer for.   And the time is long past for claiming that you couldn’t have known the damage you were doing.  Back in the 1950s, when gay people were still living their lives in the shadows, and at least plausibly throughout the 60s and much of the 70s, when gay people were just beginning to step forward in society and demand their place at the table, you could argue that you didn’t really know any gay people, nor much about their lives other then what you heard in the newspapers and from the guy thumping his pulpit in church.  But there is no excuse from ignorance today.  

And yet you see otherwise decent and intelligent people digging in their heels over it, to ridiculous lengths nowadays, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that not only there is nothing necessarily damaging about homosexuality, but that same sex romantic love and intimacy is just as necessary and life affirming for gay people, as it is for heterosexuals.  It’s startling to look at sometimes.  The opposition to this is essentially boxing itself in the same coffin made of junk science and religious dogma that the creationists have.  Why?  For some I’m sure it’s fear of loosing their brittle faith, the only thing keeping them afloat in a rapidly changing world.  But for others, the ones who are otherwise more flexible in their spirituality, more able to cope with change, it’s something far more disturbing then the loss of one’s inner bearings.  They can feel a mountain of guilt hanging just over their heads. 

What have we been doing to these people all this time?  What have we done?  What have I done?