Quote of the day: Maggie Gallagher

Ardent equality opponent Maggie Gallagher left NOM a while ago (perhaps even she was put off by their ever more explicitly anti gay rhetoric) and concedes that her side has lost.  But she also recognizes that there is no way for her side to deal with the issue until they recognize the reality that people they love may be gay.  She writes, 

.... what I want you to take away, from the Charles Cooper story: Whatever we do, and whatever we say, we have to be willing to say it, as if to a beloved child of our own family, coming to us with a loving gay marriage. 

There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.” 

We are all tangled up in Love with sin, our own and that of those we love. 

.....I could have a gay child. Anyone could have a gay child. Other people I know have gay children. Our children are beloved and yet do not necessarily put together the world the way we would have them. We have to love them anyway, across all the gaps. 

A movement able to withstand what is coming will have to face the Love problem first. 

Anything we say, anything we believe, we are going to have to be willing to say it not only with a generic gay person in the room, but as if to a beloved gay child.

The article goes downhill from there, but still... at some level she "gets" it.

So I will draw a distinction between Gallagher and other hate-promulgators.  She's got a lot of issues, and I obviously disagree with her profoundly,  but I do think she's the only one trying to grapple with a modus vivendi, however wrong I may find her.

And I think it is significant that she left NOM.