Excerpt from Paul Mero's opening remarks at the Common Ground debate with Equality Utah:

The gloves must come off. The fact remains that we don't just disagree with you over the Common Ground Initiative, we disagree with you over nearly every motivating assumption that underlies the initiative.

We're dealing here with two separate realities: one truth, one illusion. The intellectual, legal and moral chasm between the two sides is so great that true common ground is nearly impossible to achieve. And so, for my part anyway, I'm here to argue that the Equality Utah version of reality is an illusion.

The CGI bills constantly refer to sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is an illusion. It only exists in the minds of activists, and their academics, who need to explain away why people do what they do even when they don't want to do it.

There are no replicable scientific or medical studies about that issue of sexual orientation that exist. Never mind that the only way it can be identified is through sexual behavior. There's no reasonable argument to be made that subjective feelings or attractions toward another human being means anything deeper than what it actually is.

The truth is that we are born male and female with moral agency. Because it's behavior, our sexuality is always a choice, and any other sexual construct is an illusion.

Your idea of rights is an illusion. With the backing of every miserable misanthropic philosopher of the post-Enlightenment era, your initiative feeds on the unreasonable notion that you have these magically organic rights to do whatever you desire.

These rights are usually couched in terms of equality, but because you constantly confuse what you do for who you are, your equality is illusory. You think your equality is about who you are, when it's really only about what you do. In terms of human behavior, there's no equality as you try to imagine.