“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing,” New York State Senator Roy McDonald, a Republican from Saratoga, said Tuesday. You hope to get there; McDonald did. He became the thirty-first of sixty-two senators in Albany to say that he would vote for a bill, submitted by Governor Andrew Cuomo, allowing same-sex marriage in our state. McDonald’s statement, as captured by the Daily News, continued,

You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, f— it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.

I do like that; and who wants to be cynical? What, really, could be less cynical than a heartfelt commitment to marriage? The bill is only one senator short now, with a vote scheduled for Friday, and its proponents are optimistic that another senator will have reached the point in his or her life that McDonald has. Some of the pressure McDonald was shaking off came from religious groups. Archbishop Timothy Dolan posted a diatribe against the bill on his blog Tuesday, in which he wrote, “Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America—not in China or North Korea.” His point was not that gay marriage is allowed in those places—it is not, though it is in Iowa and five other American states—but that over there “communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of ‘family’ and ‘marriage’ means.” Is Dolan picturing a marriage altar as a sort of death panel? Or does he just think all that should be left to the church?

Dolan continues,

And what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?

That is, speaking very charitably, a non-sequitur. There are all sorts of reasons children are raised in families that don’t include “a mom and a dad”; Dolan must know that. Same-sex marriage isn’t one of them. Maybe Dolan believes that divorce, in any circumstance, violates a child’s rights; how about children adopted by gay parents—does he believe that their rights would be protected by lingering in foster care, bounced from non-home to non-home? Would he prefer that those born to gay or lesbian parents had never existed? If so, that is a pretty tangled position for a Catholic (or even for a writer of North Korean communiqués). Does he think that children should be taken away from gay parents (or single widowed parents, for that matter) who have loved them all their lives to be given to any heterosexual, or even just heterogeneous, couple? And even if he agrees with all of that, what on earth does it have to do with same-sex marriage? Allowing two people who love each other to marry will not stop people who don’t love each other from separating, or from getting married in the first place. Neither marriage nor love is a scarce resource. And yet Dolan talks as though there were thieves in his house.

If one’s only interest in all this is the rights of children, then gay marriage is really an imperative. (There are other factors, too, of course, that don’t depend on children: respect, fairness, kindness.) Marriage can protect children—legally, financially, socially—and same-sex marriage will give more parents more ways to protect more children. Making that possible is surely the right thing to do.