The American Taliban in secular clothing.
There was a piece in Raw Story about the Washington State SC ruling on gay marriage. Among the reader-posted comments that followed was one by a guy who identified himself as "Joe". Joe stated that, "False marriage or 'anti-marriage' does not exits [sic]. Marriage is between man and woman."
Joe went on to say that we (he did not involve God in this) had created marriage as a means of protecting women and elevating them to a status equal to that of men within the context of the family. Since gays were of the same sex they, unlike men and women, were by definition already equal to each other in a relationship. Also, a gay relationship could never be or result in a family in the traditional sense. Therefore marriage couldn't apply to gays. Any marriage between gays would be a "false" marriage because it would be without purpose or substance.
Judging from the overall tone of this and his previous posts, I am pretty confident that Joe is against gay marriage on religious grounds. Yet he went to great pains to develop a non-religious argument against it. I'm wondering if this is indicative of a shift in the way the religious right are pushing their agenda.
Another example is in the RR's opposition to the "morning after" pill. They paint it as an "abortion" pill (although it's not) because they know that most pro-choicers do not encourage the use of abortion as just another form of birth control. They also say that it will encourage promiscuity among teenagers and young adults by providing one more way to neutralize the threat of getting pregnant, which threat apparently helps keep them chaste.
Okay so there are some problems with their arguments. But the point is that there is not a lot of talk about God and His plan for your life, and sin and fornication in all of this. Are the Christian Right beginning to conclude that by couching things in terms of their version of Biblical morality they are only preaching to the Fundie choir while risking alienating or boring the rest of us?
Joe's "false marriage" argument has for me all the earmarks of something that some church leadership has cooked up as a talking point aimed at the majority of Americans who are turned off by Fundie rhetoric. Is it the new strategy of the American Taliban to downplay their religious message as a means of advancing their religious agenda?