For conservatives, the concept of family is (1) the same as the Judeo-Christian model God ordained, (2) a model supported by every other major world religion. It is the same unit (3) recognized by the laws of nature, the (4) laws of government, and (5) civilized societies for thousands of years: (6) one man, married to one woman, with so many children as God should see fit to entrust to their care through birth or adoption.

If that happens, the high priests and priestesses of political correctness will have done irreparable harm to yet another pillar of the American paradigm for our patriotic, wholesome culture — “God, the flag, mom and apple pie.”

The Obama administration makes the incredible assertion that motherhood is superfluous to rebut an argument that the traditional two-parent family, led by both a mother and a father, provides the ideal situation to raise a child. In defiance of biology, nature and common sense, the administration argues that children need neither a father nor a mother and that having two fathers or two mothers or more is just as good as having one of each.

Government, both federal and state, has a legitimate and defensible interest in ensuring that children conceived by a mother and father are, in fact, raised by their biological mothers and fathers whenever possible.

(1) Says you. (2) Except the "multiple wives" ones. (3) There is no "marriage" at all in the "laws of nature", and you have no earthly clue what the "laws of nature" even might be, and "family" in nature is the result of anything from pair bonding to harems to gang rape to ritual murder to situational hermaphroditism to the male of the species biting the female upon which his body is slowly dissolved and absorbed into the female until only only the testicles are left, so shut up about what the supposed laws of nature say we should be doing to get ourselves in a family way and (4) see (2), and (5) see (2) and (4) and a whole mess of civilized societies who thought having a young boy on the side was the purest form of love there could be and (6) I'm just going to point out, yet a-freaking-gain, that the whole concept of "marriage" has been for nearly all of human history a question of property rights, and the spouse counted as a useful but not necessarily decisive portion of the property. I now have an absolute hatred for the sack that is Tim Huelskamp because he managed to hork up nearly every self-centered, pompous-assed non-argument used by outright morons in the span of one quick paragraph, and there really ought to be a rule saying if you do that the general citizenrygets to put you in the official congressional Dunk Tank and start flinging balls until somebody gets lucky.God damn it, here we have a person honestly using "God, the flag, mom and apple pie" as the pillars of "the American paradigm," and they're not doing it ironically, neither the "apple pie" or the "paradigm" part. No, Tim here means it literally, and goes on to say that Bloomberg's soda ban and Michelle Obama's gentle-but-possibly-Hitlerish suggestions that our nation's kids get up off their fat asses every once in a while means that apple pie is under attack. This screed isn't an April Fool's prank, this is a April Fool's way of life, preached about by an April Fool's mind, taken as a holy god damn April Fool's sacrament.You are an idiot, and nobody's arguing anything about that, and by the way you are an idiot. Do you think—and we're just going to explore this for one second, before my migraine ends this entire path of debate—that if we do not allow same-sex marriage, those children are suddenly going to get a mom and a dad? That there are gay couples out there who, if we deny same-sex marriage, will say, "Oh, rats, well, I guess I am now going to form a lifelong partnership with the opposite gender, which will suck for me but now my hypothetical future child will at least have appropriate biological nurturing." No. This does not happen. I hate you for thinking that this will somehow happen—that the only thing standing between every child and the one-man, one-woman parenting that a great many of them do not currently have is to deny gay Americans certain legal and tax structurings.You, Tim Huelskamp, are a monster. Here you say that children should be raised by their biological mothers and fathers, and yet you say yourself that you've adopted four of them. You are a terrible person. Those children will never know the love of a genetically related male/female pairing placed in that prime nurturing role, and I can only assume it's because you, you bastard, adopted them rather than letting them rot in an orphanage or on the streets where they could get a better appreciation of why it is they would want that thing.

I don't even want to go through all of Huelskamp's drivel; it's all just a collection of other people's most vapid thoughts, dumbed down, beaten up, then put in The Sack and tossed into op-ed form. It hurts. But the main argument, such as it is, is that if we let gay marriage take place then gay people are going to somehow god damn take our god damn children and raise them in god damn non-preferentially-biological households because god damn magic, and it would be better to not allow marriage equality at all than allow that. He's not even talking about "gay Americans should not adopt children", which would be at least something vaguely approaching the point he roughly purports to be orbiting around, he's saying that the Supreme Court recognizing same-sex relationships as existing things at all is an affront to "motherhood" and "God" and, sweet Jeebus, "apple pie."

This. This is why I have come to thoroughly despise this entire debate. Because it is not earnest, it is not thoughtful, it is not anything but the tin-eared rantings of bigoted, dull-minded twerps who know they don't like same sex marriages being recognized, but can't rustle up so much as even the slightest actual, substantive non-God-says-so argument against the thing. God does not care what the tax status of same-sex couples is, nor do I expect the big guy on the cloud has a pressing interest in making sure a pair of people can't get hospital visitation or other legal rights if they don't have the proper combination of non-matching genitalia. Even if we were to all stipulate that a one-mom-one-dad family is better for the children than a one-mom or one-dad single-parent version in all cases, full stop, which itself is an implausible argument, you had at least better occupy yourself with explaining why you think a two-dad version has to be inferior to a single father, or a two-mom version worse than the single mom version, and not this damn generic high fructose corn syrup of arguments, this blanket assertion that if we somehow discriminate more it will result in unspecified magic in which we don't have single parents or foster homes or divorce or cheating spouses or broken homes or abusive parents or one bad traffic accident or teenage moms or Those Damn People Who Think Different From Me anymore.

This is what happens when the last blowhards in an argument know they have lost. This is what happens when all sensible people have, at long last, moved on, leaving only the dim bulbs and the lard-for-brains and the burlap sacks of discount-grade asbestos to prop up the dying cause. You get people like this guy, droning on with mealy-mouthed phrases that mean nothing, mustered for an argument that doesn't even make any internal sense, mustered because the only people left on the loser's side of the debate are people who do not give a damn whether their arguments make any sense, and all regurgitated up by whatever die-hard friendly rag has not yet evolved sufficient shame to know how silly it all looks. I will be very, very glad when these people evolve that sense of shame. Anytime now, please.