Gay marriage foe and former National
Organization for Marriage (NOM) president Maggie Gallagher balks at
ThinkProgress for saying that her logic is flawed.
When Gallagher wrote that she hopes
society can promote heterosexuality and discourage “cruel
homophobia,” the progressive blog's Zack Ford responded that
Gallagher's goals were incompatible: “Either all people are equal
in society or they are not; she cannot have her straight-only wedding
cake and eat it stigma-free.”
In a new post, Gallagher responded to
Ford.
“It is possible to affirm an ideal
without stigmatizing the alternatives – to affirm in the positive
without pushing the negative. But gay marriage advocates insist that
any affirmation of the ideal represents a denigration of them, no
matter how expressed,” she wrote.
Ford
volleyed back: “The problem with Gallagher's argument is that
she does push the negative. There would be no need to highlight her
attempts to justify heterosexism if she were not also justifying the
idea that the gay community should be denied access to the securities
and benefits of marriage.”
It should also be noted that the
various conservative groups that Gallagher supports have stood
arm-in-arm with vitriolic homophobes, including NOM, whose current
president, Brian Brown, in 2010 stood up for religious speakers
involved with the group who described gay people as “perverted,”
“diseased” and likely pedophiles.
When asked whether he would repudiate
the remarks, Brown
answered: “What I believe is that pastors and religious leaders
need to be able to speak up for traditional, Christian sexual
morality. And they have the right to do that. They have the
obligation to do that.”