Why does every article he writes start with the phrase, “The Elephant in the Room”?

Because that’s the title of his bi-weekly column in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

And what’s amusing is that:

1) The ACLU would come down on the person suing like a ton of 1st Amendment bricks, and
2) Within a week, and into the foreseeable future, rightwing radio/ email spam/ etc. would be ranting about how the ACLU tried to sue churches for hate speech. (See, ie, here)

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Santorum’s column is one of the main reasons I don’t buy the Inquirer anymore. I don’t have a problem with them running columns by conservatives; it’s that they somehow felt compelled to provide a soapbox for that deeply unpleasant man after he had been roundly rejected not just by Philly voters (that’s a given - he only got around 16% of the Philly vote in ‘06) but by the state as a whiole, with the biggest margin of defeat for an incumbent Senator in over 25 years. Let him drag his own grungy little box around to stand on while he incomprehensively rants at the people walking by.

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Mr. Frothy Mix: ” . . . and churches, and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.”

MikeEss: “ Look. If Bob Jones had believed that interracial dating was wrong, but implemented no policy against it, there would have been no legal problem.”

Interestingly, it’s been argued (by, for example,Randall Balmer) that the real issue that set off the religious right’s mass incursion into politics wasn’t abortion or school prayer or any of that - it was, in fact, the IRS’ attempt to take away Bob Jones’ U. tax-exempt status due to blatant racial discrimination. I suspect for the leaders of the Christianist movement, that’s what it’s all about, and what it has been all about: the right not just to be bigoted asses in the name of religion - which, as noted, is largely protected by the same Constitution they hate so much - but to get to openly discriminate against their fellow citizens in non-religious activities while receiving special gov’t privileges and happily suckling at the gov’t teat.

Come on, MA legalized universal marriage rights in 2003 and implemented in 2004. Last I checked, it hasn’t had any of the impacts predicted.

What impact has it had? Well, with 2/9 households on my street getting married as a result, it has increased community bonding, lawnmower sharing is up, snowblowing of driveways has increased, and jumpstarts are up 200%.

Horrible consequences, I tell ya. Horrible.

There seem to be many fundnuts for whom that is quite enough to justify denying it…

There is too much civil law directly linked to the word “marriage” - and even leaving gay people out of the mix, it sets up (at least rhetorical) second-class status to people who get hitched by the civil authorities.

Sets up (or perpetuates) the “real marriages only happen in church” misunderstanding.

If anyone seriously proposed taking the word “marriage” away from everyone - call church weddings “covenants” and civil weddings “civil unions” and then let the word “marrriage” be fully applicable (and legally meaningless) to all of them, I might go along.

After all, a married man is a husband, a married woman is a wife, but they are both legally spouses.

And it isn’t a solution to marriage equality for gay people anyway - lots of gay people get married in church now, they just don’t get legal benefits. Most of these “compromise proposals” conveniently ignore that reality, and won’t extend the word marriage to same-sex couples even if they do get married in church, which pretty much explodes the underlying agenda of their proposal.

All these gymnastics are really about one thing - getting to hold onto gay people not really being the same as or as good as “real people.” When they talk about how “Americans feel about gay people” as though the two categories are distinct, you see it as well. Well, sorry. gay people ARE Americans (those of us who are, that is) and we ARE citizens.

One aspect of the California court decision just keeps coming up - once you have already granted that gay people should get all of the privileges and responsibilities of marriage, what reason is left to deny the word marriage, other than pure animus?