It’s a big week for us homosexuals.  Two major marriage equality cases before the Supreme Court:  Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act.  I have to admit I’m torn.  Not about either case.  However broadly or narrowly they find, the justices need to knock down both of these ridiculous laws.  My conundrum is that as a gay man I feel I ought to comment, but what’s left to say?  In the LGBT community, we’ve been in this debate off and on for years.    The commentary and reportage that’s been burning up the airwaves for the past few days is just a rendering down of a million discussions and arguments we’ve already had.  It reminds me of when I reached my coming out tipping point, when it was no longer scary or exciting or fun or even politically empowering to tell people I was gay.  I was tired and I just wanted people to figure it out for themselves.

The other daunting aspect of these cases is the unusual amount of ground they cover.  Marriage Equality opponents bob and weave and change their arguments at the speed of sound.  None of the points they make is logical enough to stand up under any kind of scrutiny, so the strategy seems to be to bounce among them randomly and so quickly they keep the rest of us off balance.  Like the song says, “Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle.  Daze and dizzy ‘em.”

Luckily, it seems that this week’s crash course on the subject is making the weakness of the opposition clearer and clearer to everyone.  When the subject wasn’t hot and they had the luxury of engaging and tossing off one or two specious thoughts every few years, no one outside the LGBT community paid that much attention.  Now they’ve been put under the microscope through their own misguided machinations.

Simply stated, Marriage Equality is a big, big thing for gays and lesbians and the people who love us.  Conversely, it will be a tiny, tiny, tiny thing for everyone else.  Barely a blip on their radar, to tell the truth.  Even when Marriage Equality is the law of the land, I promise you the heterosexuals will not all throw their hands in the air, scream “You’ve ruined it!” and give up on the institution.  Children will not be begotten out of wedlock any more often than they are today.  The homosexual ranks will not balloon because of more efficient recruitment efforts.  And most important of all, we will not have opened the door for me to marry my Irish Setter, though I may love him dearly.

No one wants to make a flat out prediction of what the Supreme Court will do with these cases, but the general feeling seems to be that DOMA is going down and that Prop. 8 is not going to be upheld.  Hurrah!  I hope the pundits are right.  I’d like the nay sayers to see how little their world changes and, maybe, how foolish and just plain mean they’ve been.