You misunderstand; I never said I was against gay marriage, and don't need convincing.

I just think people need to be more careful when they ascribe motives (being "anti-gay") to political views that might incidentally oppress people ("anti-gay marriage").

That kind of in-your-face aggression makes people defensive and withdrawn, rather than engaged and ready to be convinced.

It's like if someone is for strict crack cocaine punishments, and somebody just saying "well being blatantly racist toward African Americans is unacceptable". Maybe they just hadn't yet connected the dots from their political position to the incidental impact it has on people.

Crack cocaine vs African Americans is rather more indirect though.

Being anti-gay marriage directly means "I want gay people to not have the following rights: x, y and z," and in that sense it is directly anti-gay.

It's not as severe as criminalizing being gay or even putting the death penalty on it, but it is definitely anti-gay.

P.S. I never meant to imply you were against gay marriage; was just pointing you to the most convincing argument.

Yikes, people obviously feel strongly about this as they are downvoting comments clearly made in good faith.

> Being anti-gay marriage directly means "I want gay people to not have the following rights: x, y and z," and in that sense it is directly anti-gay.

It is more direct, but not absolutely direct. People get religious over the word "marriage", which shouldn't be surprising because in a lot of ways it's primarily a religious concept. A lot of them actually don't mind if gay people have rights x, y, and z. But by framing the whole conversation around "marriage", it bypasses the question of rights for a lot of people. It jumps right to challenging their long-held, internalized view of what the word "marriage" means.

And that might be an important thing to challenge! But for a lot of people it's a separate issue from the rights question.

I agree that marriage and 'rights conferred by marriage' could have been split.

That's actually how gay marriage was introduced in the Netherlands, through something called a 'cohabitation-agreement.'

My experience is that a lot of the people who opposed official recognition of gay couples don’t connect the two, even when faced with such a case. Few people have been in a situation when that actually was a problem, grave enough to require family presence, and the family would refuse to share information, or the nurses would block the way.

The principle of it is wrong, but opponents don’t connect the dots.