I have avoided this issue for quite a while...too long. The whole reason that gay marriage receives the invective crap it does from Republicans and Democrats and who the F*** knows who else is...

DING! DING! DING! American conservative Christianity.

And guess what? It all comes down to an argument of definition. What is marriage but a union between a man and a woman? What is a marriage but the union of two consenting adults? So on and on and on and on and on and on.

But what gets me...is two things: the first is based on general legal principle a la the constitution and the second is a bit personal.

1. The government has no place defining what a church can and can't define as a marriage. "Whoa!" you might think. PDB has lost it. He supports religion.

No. I support a disentanglement of government with religion. If you look at the Lemon Test, I think you could make an inferential argument that allowing churches to dominate a civil institution like marriage entangles the government with the church. That's unacceptable.

The government should respect church marriages and allow consenting adults to marry one another no matter if they are male-male, female-female, male-female, male-hermaphrodite, female-hermaphrodite, or hermaphrodite-hermaphrodite. The government should allow adults to make up their own minds and it baffles me that the any branch of government invades upon this area.

2. My sisters are gay. Well...one of them is biological and the other is illegally married into my family. They are beautiful. Devoted. Patient. Loving. But for f***'s sake, they pay taxes and are limited in their freedoms because religious wingnuts want them to be stoned to death under Levitical law. Madness.

At some point, I'll elaborate further. I wish that the Dems would pony up.