#1 is a falsely narrow characterization of marriage; #2 is spreading lies and bigotry, and #3 is a straw man, and a despicable one used in this context.

The movement also plays into the hands of those who want to cast the entire conservative majority in the Court as extremist clones of Clarence Thomas, who is to the right of Genghis Kahn as the cliche goes.

“Marriage policy should be about the children,” Newsweek Senior Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer says in the group’s launch video. “It’s not about bestowing public policy legitimacy and conferring economic benefits when it comes to adults who have their own idiosyncratic desires.”

Wrong, Bigot-Breath! Marriage policy must be about allowing people to form stable family units, the building blocks of civilization. As long as there are legal benefits to being married, it is unconstitutional to withhold those benefits according to irrelevant characteristics like skin color, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Defining marriage as an institution focused on creating and caring for children is not just delusional but offensive. Do I really have to write about this again? Waaay back when Massachusetts courts ruled that access to marriage was a civil right, Ethics Alarms examined the opinion, based on the Massachusetts state constitution (authored by John Adams) and concluded yup, the legal reasoning is tight, there’s no way around this: same-sex marriage on a national basis is an inevitability. And thus it came to pass even as I foretold.

The quotes of the advocates of this doomed and incendiary movement are unanimously hysterical, counter-factual or drug-induced miasma:

Colson Center CEO John Stonestreet, for example, claims social science data reveals that kids “do best when they are raised in a home with married, biological mom and dad.” What’s “best,” I wonder? I know several happy families with married, same-sex parents, but many more split up, divorced, shared-parenting families where the kids aren’t sure who they should call “Mom.” Does this coalition want to ban divorce? Separation?

“We’re prioritizing the fantasies of adults, no matter how earnestly those fantasies are felt, over the real needs and the real good of children,” The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles warns. Homosexuality is not a “fantasy” asshole, any more than heterosexuality is. I also know closeted gay men who are in heterosexual marriages and sire kids, while they and their spouses engage in adultery to keep themselves sane. Knowles’ characterization is pure bigotry. Two women who marry to form a family unit and who adopt or have a child by other means should be recognized as infinitely more healthy for children than forced opposite sex unions.

Nobody would dare tell my late father about how two-parent families are indispensable to the health and welfare of children. He was raised by a fierce single mother during the Depression, and would answer, “One caring, loving, responsible parent is far better than two parents when one of them is uncaring, uncommitted, and abusive.”

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler says that gay marriage “harms children in virtually every way imaginable.” No hyperbole, gross generalization or bias there! Then Heritage Foundation’s Delano Squires notes that “every single child, every single human being is the living embodiment of the relationship between exactly one man and one woman.”

Why thank-you for that, Delano, and may I add, water is wet. So what? Are we saying that marriages that are not focused on procreation don’t count? What are you saying?

All this movement is saying in reality is “We think gay people are icky and sick, and want to return to the good ol’ days when they hid those nasty “proclivities” and we could discriminate against them at will.”

Same sex marriage isn’t going to be overturned, but conservatives will alienate more Americans trying to get it overturned, with potentially disastrous results. If, by some miracle, these reactionaries were successful, the chaos the decision would cause would be widespread and ugly. Expanding rights is always controversial, but removing rights places a stigma on everyone who engaged in what was previously permitted.

Remember, the Supreme Court did not make abortion illegal when it overturned the weak and badly reasoned Roe decision. The law and reasoning in Obergefell was and remains solid, and based on that ruling, millions of families were created, openly and with the blessing of the State, that are thriving today. Declaring those marriages as illicit, harmful, and rejected by the government, as second class unions that stigmatize the couples as well as their children, will accomplish nothing except satisfy obstinate moralists stuck in the cultural norms of primitive populations, when homosexuality was a genuine threat to survival. The costs, however, will be genuinely destructive, not just to gays and same-sex couples, but to society and the U.S. itself.