First of all, my apologies to those of my readers--all five of you--who've been wondering where I've been. It's not that there hasn't been anything newsworthy to blog, it's that I've been caught up in the hubbub of a cross-country move and job hunt.

I need to break my silence, though, and I've been itching to comment on the gay marriage issue that was so recently pushed to the forefront of national news. Time Magazine has an article profiling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and his recent decision to open marriage licenses to same-sex couples, and I think the headline of the article--I Do ... No, You Don't!--is a uniquely insightful comment on the motivations of those opposed to gay marriage.

Many in the blogosphere have already weighed in on this matter. Josh Marshall has a very honest bit of soul-searching that is well worth a read, particularly for those who are on the fence with this issue. Andrew Sullivan, of course, has been all over this, and while his legendary disingenuousness requires one to take what he writes with a salt shaker, he's close enough to this issue personally that he's hitting many of the right notes. Calpundit has a pretty good roundup of links. And Glenn Reynolds, to whom I'm averse to linking, isn't the first or the last person to compare Newsom's actions to that of Judge Roy Moore--you know, the Alabama judge who put Ten Commandments monument in his courthouse and defied a court order to remove it.

A few thoughts spring to mind, here.

• First of all, I have to be completely honest and say that from a legal standpoint, I put Newsom and Moore in the same category. Fundamentally, they are both doing the same thing: defying, in their capacity as public officials, a law that they feel is unjust. Both of them believe that their defiance is justified under the Constitution--in Moore's case, he seemed to feel that the First Amendment /protected/ his right to religious expression, while in Newsom's, he feels that the equal protection clause in the California State Constitution trumps the initiative that banned same-sex marriage in the state.

  There are differences, of course--but ultimately, the difference for me is that I think that Newsom's cause is just and correct, and that Moore's is not. I believe that Newsom is fighting for equality, whereas Moore was trying to insert his religion into a place it has no business being.

• If you want a reliable buzzword or phrase to use as a channel marker for gauging how uninformed or prejudiced someone is, watch for use of the word "sacred"--usually combined with "institution"--in an argument against gay marriage. The debate about gay marriage isn't about whether churches should be allowed to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies--they already can choose to do so or not. The debate is about whether the State, as a secular institution, should confer the legal status and incidences of marriage upon same-sex couples. This is distinct and separate from the religious ceremony of marriage.

  The word "sacred" has no place in this equation. When someone starts talking about the "sanctity of marriage", they have left the realms of law and logic and revealed that their argument rests on the shaky foundation of religious bigotry.

• Equally specious is the argument that marriage should only be between a man and a woman because that is how it has always been. If you're familiar with fallacies, it's called an Appeal to Tradition. Slavery was a tradition in most of the world for thousands of years, but for the last few hundred years we've been evolving beyond that. Just because a thing has always been so, or is currently believed to be so, does not make it right. Moreover, those who assert that our contemporary model of marriage is the only natural one are ignorant of history--polygamy and group marriages, for example, aren't solely the province of the Mormons church.
• As seems to be happening in so many other ways recently, the worm has turned. Gay marriage is inevitable. Conservative pundits, religious bigots and Joe Six-Pack will rant and rail, but to no avail. Now that the issue has been correctly framed as one of equality and basic human decency, Bush and others who publicly oppose gay marriage will be unable to mount an opposition without revealing their prejudices for what they are.

More to come, I'm sure. But that'll do for now.