I recently wrote a commentary, titled "Same Sex Marriage: 'Thoroughly Tiresome,' by Design," which was met with a surprisingly acerbic response.  In an effort to perhaps take my interlocutor-accusers a little more seriously than they take themselves, here's my response to one of those who disagreed with me, but who had the decency to be civil.

Here's the posted comment:

JeffreyRO55

Tiresome? What could be more tiresome than an anti-gay clinging to victimhood?  Get over yourself, Mr. Mainwaring. Gay people deserve the same legal rights as straight people. There is absolutely no rational reason to believe otherwise.

My response:

"Tiresome"

The term "Tiresome" isn't my term.  It is a direct quote from the authors of After the Ball who said:

The main thing is to talk about gayness until the issue becomes thoroughly tiresome.

I think if you had read either their book or my commentary, and not just the title of my piece, you would know their strategy was to make the topic of gay rights so commonplace, so ordinary, that it would become boring and "tiresome."  The title actually pays a compliment to gay activists.  It's a recognition of their stunning achievement, yet you seem to perceive it as a personal insult.

"Victimhood"

I don't claim to be a victim, so I'm not sure why you suggest I am clinging to victimhood.

But since you raised the topic, as evidenced by reader comments, the mobbing and silencing tactics are very real.  Name calling is what we all learn to do in kindergarten to silence others we don't like or agree with.  It's Bullying 101.

So, when a bunch of grown men, many of whom – judging by the pictures they've provided – are middle-aged, overweight and mustachioed, start engaging in mean girls histrionics and anonymous online schoolyard name calling, that's a very creepy breed of silencing indeed.

Here are some examples from the Joe My God website, and others are from guests at American Thinker

According to some, I am an:

(From an AT Guest) ignorant, grotesque, waste of life, anti-freedom, anti-American, parasitic, self-loathing, gay Uncle Tom, mentally diseased, barbarian Nazi TRASH?  You will meet the same fate as [Himmler] would have if the coward had not killed himself. That fate being legally tired (sic), convicted, and sentenced to death for your crimes against humanity. That is you fate and nobody will care that you are gone because the world will be a better place because of it.

And since we're already on the topic of Nazism:

(From Sean) It is the anti-gay REICH that is actually calling for gay people to be raped, tortured, beaten, imprisoned, silenced, and murdered for being LGBT living freely in public. Doug Manwhoring, you are a Nazi supporting the oppression of all LGBT people who will not keep their throats under the blood covered boots of the anti-gay reich and for that history will not be kind to you. Future generations will view you as repulsive and evil which you are.

Others nixed Nazi accusations and chose canine comparisons:

(From Jim)  Doug, I know you're as homely as a dog's rear end, but there's got to be a better way to get gay guys to notice you than this!

And while we are on the topic of dogs:

(From Kit)  Wouldn't the kindest thing be just to take him to the vet's and have him euthanized?

Continuing in the vein of death:

(From blueberriesForMe) Doug, go back to that hole you dug and make it larger. Then take all your fellow self-hating homocon selves with you and bury yourself along with them. At least you can be useful to the worms. Happy Springtime!

Wow, all this vitriol because of a disagreement over one little eight letter word – marriage.  And for this I should be executed?  Really?  I am no better than horse excrement (thank you, BudClark)?  Really?

Again, I'm not claiming to be a victim.  And I certainly wouldn't do so because of these  comments.  Let's face it: this is just fourth-grade-girl sniping (my apologies to fourth-grade girls everywhere for that comparison).  There isn't a man on Earth who would be bothered or intimidated by "Doug Manwhoring has the mental capacity and maturity of a 3 second old infant."

"Anti-gay"

Who is anti-gay?  Not me.  For Pete's sake, I haven't rejected gay guys; I've dated them!  And I've been in LTRs (long term relationships) with them!  And only gay guys, never str8 ones!  Doesn't that make me pro-gay?

Also, as I recall, everyone in the chorus I used to sing with (The Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, D.C.) is gay.  I didn't choose to sing with a straight choir; I chose the Gay Men's Chorus.  Does that make me anti-gay or pro-gay?

My fabulous official diamond-studded (not really) GMCW lapel pin, resting on top of my official red Christmas GMCW cummerbund.

Before I started writing, I was a successful upper-bracket real estate agent in the Washington, D.C. area.  You almost have to be gay to fit into that world.  And you certainly have to be gay-friendly to thrive.  Back in the 1990s, I was perhaps the first Washington-area real estate agent to advertise in Architectural Digest Magazine for the mid-Atlantic region.  That in itself is tremendously gay/pro-gay.

I also used to volunteer one night per week at the Missionaries of Charity (Mother Theresa's) Home in Northeast D.C. for indigent men dying of AIDS.  Each week I fed, bathed, changed diapers for, held hands with, hugged, read to, prayed with, and entertained men who were near death due to AIDS.  I don't think my volunteerism makes me anti-gay.  I didn't stay home watching E! or Logo.  As heartbreaking as it often was, I chose to be with gay men in need.

Frankly, I'm pretty sure no one who knows me would ever think to call me anti-gay. 

I presume that the only difference between me and the many Joe My God devotees and AT Guest Commentators is that I disagree with the notion that mono-gendered relationships can legitimately be identified as marriages.  Yet for that one difference of opinion, despite everything else, my life is reduced to being nothing more than an anti-gay "Hater."

Gay People Deserve the Same Rights as Straight People

Back to Jeffery:

I agree with you completely.  Gay people deserve all the same legal rights as straight people.  That's a no brainer.  And you're right, there's absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.

However, Gays Don't Want Marriage

This whole disagreement stems not from gays being discriminated against by a society that wants to deny them rights.  It stems from gays choosing to abandon certain rights.  Gays reject the right to marriage.  Most don't want marriage.  They want something different from marriage.  They want a committed, sexual relationship with another man.  And in practice, sometimes these are monogamous, but let's face it: most evolve into open or semi-open relationships.

If gays truly wanted marriage, they would find a nice girl, get a minister, get hitched, and settle down.  But that's not what gays want.  They want something that marriage is not.

They want to slide into bed every night with a guy they love.  They want to walk down the street hand in hand or arm in arm with that guy.  They want to live a life with that guy in a house with a picket fence, maybe a pool in the backyard, and a dog and a cat.  But that's not marriage.  No matter how much you decorate your life together to make it look like your relationship is a marriage, it is not.

Having forsaken that right, the 1.7% of American adults who are gay or lesbian demanding to call their relationships "marriage" inflict an enormous burden on the other 98.3% of American adults.  To ask the entire population to forsake the definition of marriage, and pretend that two guys or two women together is a marriage, is asking way too much.  It demands that intellectual honesty be shut down; it demands that common sense be turned off.  It demands that we all pretend.  It demands that we all become intellectually dishonest.

Gay activists want everyone to go along with the charade that we're all engaged in the exact same thing. We are not.

This can't be stated strongly enough

It's not that gays are weak victims, deprived of marriage by society.  The exact opposite is true:  they are strong-minded and iron-willed in their rejection of women, resolute in their choice not to grow as human beings in their appreciation for half the human race.  Instead, many choose to celebrate that rejection, and, in a sense, the act of claiming betrothal between two men serves to mock the immutable sacrament of marriage.  It's a way to "stick it to the man," to religion, to tradition, to natural law.  It's a declaration of independence from half the human race.

The recent institutionalizing of "gay marriage" across the country is a wonder of marketing and manipulation.  Interestingly, its acceptance stems from the same mindset that "every kid on the soccer or tee ball team deserves a trophy."  No one should feel bad or left out.  Yet in reality, it's only those who achieve – who actually meet certain requirements – who truly deserve trophies.  A "Me, My, Mine" mentality that ignores natural law seems to have swept everybody off his feet.

We are not entitled to everything we want.  By instituting same-sex marriage, governments are essentially passing out tee ball trophies to everyone who wants one, even if they're playing for the other team, so to speak.

Gays have already decided to be left out of marriage.  It's the choice of many.  Even in participating in a ceremony and getting a certificate from the State, they still aren't participating in Marriage.  They are engaging in make-believe.  And so "gay marriage" is just fatuousness – a type of unserious frivolity – that even U.S. Supreme Court justices who fancy themselves as makers of history are not immune to.

One point seven percent of the people in this country need to return to intellectual honesty.  And so do the jurists, politicos, pundits, and all their for-profit and nonprofit cronies who portray themselves as thought leaders, but who are, in reality, non-thought enforcers, anti-intellectual Kahunas.

So Jeffery, you're quite right that there is no reason to deny rights to gays – and in the history of this nation and in the history of the world, this has never been done with regard to marriage.  But gays have freely chosen to abdicate their right to marriage by being obstinate in their rejection of women, choosing to recognize them only as 'breeders" and egg donors for the children they seek to engineer.