Why can't anyone leave moral arguments out of discussions of the gay marriage issue? Phyllis Schlafly, writing for Human Events Online, notes, "President Bush has proclaimed Oct. 12-18 as Marriage Protection Week because it is becoming clearer all the time that the institution of marriage needs protection from the courts." Discussing the ruling in the case Lawrence v. Texas, Schlafly mistakenly reports that Justice Anthony Kennedy cited "a European court ruling, because he couldn't cite the U.S. Constitution." This is completely and totally false; readers of the decision will realize that the Constitution comes up immediately, in section II of the decision: "We conclude the case should be resolved by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in the private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution."

Schlafly succeeds in vilifying any judge who tries to legalize same-sex marriage by calling him an "activist," which is only pejorative to those people who don't like activist judges, viz., Schlafly herself. Her only defense for why gay marriage should be illegal is the repetition of the word "sanctity," as though by repeating this word, her argument will become stronger. But she never succeeds in getting by the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal protection under the law. Limiting marriage to heterosexuals only violates the Fourteenth Amendment due to the legal guarantees afforded couples classified as "married." The website ReligiousTolerance.org enumerates some of the 1,400 privileges afforded couples simply because they are married ("Typically these are composed of about 400 state benefits and over 1,000 federal benefits"). These include joint parenting; joint adoption; joint foster care, custody, and visitation (including non-biological parents); status as next-of-kin for hospital visits and medical decisions where one partner is too ill to be competent; joint insurance policies for home, auto and health; and dissolution and divorce protections such as community property and child support (more examples are available at the website).

Where is Schlafly's answer to the equal protection issue? It's nowhere, ostensibly because she does not want to afford homosexuals that same rights as everyone else. This is not a question of sanctity of anything; it's a question of one group of people imposing its morals on everyone else. This is why those opposed to gay marriage can only offer demagogical arguments: they understand that if it were a straigh-up legal issue, homosexuals would be allowed to marry. As such, they try to entangle morality and "sanctity" into the debate to try and confuse everyone on the outside of that debate. "A public uninformed about the U.S. Constitution, an acquiescent bar and a spineless Congress have for years allowed activist judges to expand their powers at the expense of elected representatives and in violation of the separation of powers," she writes at the same time she relies on the same uninformed public to believe her arguments.