A different group has sided against gay marriage before the Supreme Court: gay men who are married to women. This is not at all unusual, that homosexual individuals enter into a marriage contract with heterosexuals, and in fact it’s actually what the right-wing wants to promote, by compelling people to only have heterosexual relationships. As is always the case when one group wants to deny rights to another, though, their arguments are sad and petty. The gay-men-married-to-straight-women have to actually argue that allowing gay-men-married-to-gay-men would somehow mean their relationships would be excluded. It always boils down to some group claiming that removing a restriction from another group is exactly the same as adding constraints on them.

The gay couples suing their states for recognition argue that gay marriage bans “disfavor and demean their very identities and existence” by excluding them from marriage. But “that could only be true if the marriages of [gay men and straight women] are fakes and shams”—which, these men assert, is simply not the case. To prove it, the brief provides the personal testimonies of 10 gay men who are now happily married to straight women. Each of these men found women eager to marry them. In one testimony, a straight woman realizes she loves her gay husband “not in spite of his attractions, but because of them.” In another, a gay men explains that admitting his continued “same-sex attractions” to his wife of 10 years actually brought “renewed closeness” to their relationship. He and his wife now have four children. These testimonies are designed to disprove the notion that gay people can only have fulfilled marriages by wedding someone of the same sex.

I think it’s kind of sweet, if true, that these men have formed solid, lasting relationships with other human beings in the absence of sexual desire, or more likely, that they have sexual desire for each other but also for other people. There is more to marriage than reliably regular boinking, or exclusivity, so more power to ’em.

But no one is arguing that all gay men must marry gay men, or they’ll be miserable. No one is arguing that gay men must get married, either — there are substantial numbers of gay and straight people who have no interest in marriage at all. If gays and lesbians can get married as they desire, it will not mean that straight marriages are dissolved or threatened, or that there will be tests to determine whether the couples in a relationship are sufficiently sexually aroused by each other, and in particular, there won’t be a policy of denying men and women marriage licenses because the guy looks too gay.

I think it’s another amazing example of projection. “I want to prevent those people from marrying, therefore they must want to destroy my marriage, too!”