Right Should Stop Slandering Gay Marriage

You know you’ve got a problem when the only way a guy who was "antisocial, a misfit, an incompetent psychiatrist and a likely Islamic fanatic" could get out of the military is if he was gay, writes Richard Cohen. The military should get its priorities straight, he writes in the Washington Post, and so, too, should the religious right. Their apocalyptic predictions of the effects of same-sex marriage on straight people are bunk.

The recent Manhattan Declaration, from a group of conservative Christians, “brings to mind the dire warnings from years past of what would happen if blacks and whites were allowed to marry.” Same-sex marriage promises “adult brothers, sisters or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships,” the document avers. Come on. “The family is the single best place to raise children,” Cohen asserts. And kids raised in a same-sex household are just fine, with one defect: “They lack a certain knee-jerk antipathy to gays.” (More gay marriage stories.)