Maggie Gallagher is an active player in the fight against marriage equality. Recently a columnist asked in his paper for those against marriage equality to make measurable prediction of the ill-effects of gays being allowed to marry. She responded in a post of at NRO’s The Corner. Here are her answers.

1)In gay-marriage states, a large minority [of sic] people committed to traditional notions of marriage will feel afraid to speak up for their views, lest they be punished in some way.
A totally unprovable test. No matter how many speak may be speaking out against gays when they marry, Ms. Gallagher will always be able to say that there are more who are too scared to speak. This is a despicable assertion. Americans speak up often and loudly even when there are doing so stupidly. American are not cowards when it comes to speech.

2)Public schools will teach about gay marriage.
If it is the law of the land then schools should teach it as such. Of course this only a negative outcome if you find the very concept to be offensive and schools shouldn;t offend your sensibilities. Schools talk about divorce, mixed race marriages, and promote football. I’ll leave it to individuals if any of those are bad things.

3)Parents in public schools who object to gay marriage being taught to their children will be told with increasing public firmness that they don’t belong in public schools and their views will not be accomodated in any way.
If by accommodation you mean that you can keep your kid from learning the law of the land, you’re right you won’t be accommodated. But if you are saying that their children be be chased out of school. No. this is absurd paranoid fantasy. The parents can always teach them at home and at church whatever they want, but when they learn how the laws works they’ll be taught facts not prejudice.

4)Religous [sic] institutions will face new legal threats (especially soft litigation threats) that will cause some to close, or modify their missions, to avoid clashing with the government’s official views of marriage (which will include the view that opponents are akin to racists for failing to see same-sex couples as married).

It’s tiring all the court cases and laws suits that tie up the Catholic church trying to force the church to marry divorced couples. Why won’t people let the Catholic Church alone and just have the unholy unions elsewhere. Oh wait, they do! Just as the Catholics are not forced to marry divorced people in their churches they will not be forced, or anyone else, to sanctify a marriage, any marriage, they do not approve of. Again this is absurd paranoid fantasy. More if the religious right playing the victim card.

5)Support for the idea “the ideal for a child is a married mother and father” will decline.

The nuclear family, mom, dad, and kids is not the ideal. It is an artifact of the 20th century. The normal family for children to be raised in is an extended family. This is how humans evolved. We’re supposed to have uncles and aunts and grandparents, and cousins all about us all the time. (Sort of the way things are in the mid-east) Ms. Gallagher is mistaking her upbringing for biological fact. Her definition of family is no more established in history than her definition of marriage. For most of human civilization marriage about about economics and politics. Men owned their wives. (Until the 1970s a man in the USA could not be prosecuted for rape against his wife. The 19-freaking-70’s)

My marriage is happy and secure and it is not threatened in the least of gay couples wed.