I’ve checked over my correspondence with Michael and have found no E-mail in which he says anything like “such a proposition would (not) be very widely supported.” It may have gone in the spam filter. I don’t understand how Michael can propose a measure, but say he’d only support it if my side brought it up first. He invented it himself. I don’t love it, but I could live with it. If it makes him feel better, OK, I’ll pretend to bring it up first. But what matters is the merits of the proposal, not who thought of it first.

As for Michael’s final comment, one of the extremely bigoted groups that is posing as an “ally” of mine has been given until the end of the business day Tuesday to remove my name from their Web site, or else I will expose them in detail. Hopefully, they’ll back down, but if they don’t, well, keep an eye on this blog Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

I’ll freely admit that David has me quoted above correctly for each word, comma, and period. However, I might object to the appearance from his statements that I wrote him as if “out of the blue” with some grand proposal to start discriminating against everyone.

Perhaps it might be more accurate to say that David and I have been attempting to engage in a regular dialogue by e-mail about our opposing viewpoints. One area of concern for David is that religious conservatives may be forced to treat gay and lesbian couples as married, although the very idea is perhaps ludicrous or even abhorrent to them.

My comments above are part of my much larger response to him that I would (personally) be okay with letting such folks discriminate against me and my husband if I similarly had the right to discriminate against (to pick a group) Orthodox Jews because perhaps I think their clothes are funny, or that they are misinterpreting my faith and I would simply prefer not to do business with them. As you can read above, I happen to think that if conservatives are proposing to keep gays and lesbians out of anti-discrimination laws and statutes, then they will have to be willing to do away with all such statutes in their entirety. After all, civil rights are civil rights — for EVERYONE.

He seems to have conveniently left out my other comments to him that I don’t think such a proposition would be very widely supported. I said I might just be happy to support such a conservative proposal if it was put forward… by opponents of marriage equality. It would provide ample evidence for one of the points marriage equality supporters like myself have been saying all along — namely, that opposition to marriage rights for same-sex couples isn’t about viewing homosexuality as “immoral” or simply “icky”; it’s about discrimination, intolerance, and denial of civil rights. And absolutely no one should be in support of that, regardless of their age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, religious belief, or any other long-standing excuse for hating people.

Unfortunately, David is unable to see that many of the people he hangs out with on his side of the issue really aren’t very nice people…