WTF?

How does someone get a paying job at The Atlantic and write this crap:

What if it is a lifestyle...
11 Dec 2008 02:00 pm

Several people referred me to Huck on the Daily Show yesterday. Good stuff. But here's one thing that's been boggling my mind lately. The case for/against gay marriage is hung-up on this idea of choice--i.e. we should frown on gay marriage because it's a deviant lifestyle. Or we shouldn't frown on it because it isn't a lifestyle, it's a biological fact. This is where the comparisons with race come in. But I always hated this argument. Whenever people say, "You should not discriminate against people because they didn't chose to be black," I hear the mild tones of wild liberal condescension.

Nobody is being condescending there, Don Quixote, but I think your inner-Clarence Thomas is showing. They are, in fact, pointing out that it is a form of prejudice similar to that that was incorporated into the laws at various government levels. Whether it was the Federally segregated army, or State miscegenation laws, or local ordinance sun-down towns, in a very real sense blacks were denied basic rights and protections under the law.

Just as gays are being denied, today.

There is no condescension. Nobody, rational at least, is saying that someone black would want to be white only that they would (assuming they were, in turn, rational) want to have the same rights and protections that whites received. Including the right to marry the spouse of their choice, or receive equal pay for equal work, or equal educational opportunities.

Really, the concept is trivially easy to understand -- basic, fundamental human rights for all.