Huh?

Ok, I has a confuse. So as the entire world probably knows by now, Obama has publically confirmed his support for gay marriage. We all know that this is nothing new, that he really did support it, but he was reticent to come out and say it in so many words for fear of backlash from more conservative types or whatever.

So, in response to this, the BBC has posted two opposing viewpoints on Obama's announcement here. And I'm a bit confused by the conservative argument. The guy doesn't come across as some sort of Fox pundit right-wing nutjob or anything, it's not like he's just spouting bile and bigotry, he's trying to make some sort of well-reasoned point, but I still don't understand his article at all. I mean, I literally don't know what he is trying to say. He talks a lot about the history of the civil rights movement in the southern states of America, and a lot about how media and popular culture outweighed local popular opinion. I see where he's coming from with that, but as soon as he starts talking about Christianity, he loses me.

America is such a fucking weird place to me, and to many people outside of it. And, I suspect, to many people inside of it. They've had separation of church and state written into their constitution from the get go, yet no one will ever be elected their president in my lifetime, I think, who does not express and live a Christian faith. Why do conservatives keep bringing Christianity into this argument about gay marriage? Why do they think it's ok for them to enforce their religious beliefs onto the rest of the population? It doesn't matter if these conservative Christians are the minority or the majority - their constitution clearly forbids religion having anything to do with the law or the way that the country is run. They're free to believe whatever they want, they're free to preach whatever they want in their churches, but why do they think they can make that law?

I don't ask these things as an outraged, bleeding-heart liberal (although I freely admit to being all of those things), I'm genuinely confused by the argument. I wanted to read his thoughts because I wanted to try to understand where it is that these people are coming from when they oppose gay marriage, but I just cannot get my head around what it is that this guy, at least, thinks. He seems to be saying that his conservative, traditionalist Christian view is that gay marriage is morally wrong. Ok. I get that much. But I just do not see any sort of legal argument for why his belief should be enshrined in law. There's lots of things I believe to be right and wrong, but I don't necessarily think that there's any basis for making laws out of those things. I just don't understand. I'm genuinely, really confused.

And I'm even more confused about the arguments that it's somehow detrimental to Christian churches for the law to oppose the things that they teach. That by making laws that are on the other side to the churches on particular issues, that it's somehow making it illegal or harder for the churches to preach what they believe? Lots of laws stand in opposition to what various churches believe and preach. For instance, the Catholic Church is opposed to divorce, abortion, contraception, sex outside marriage, and the death penalty, but no one is seriously arguing that the church's freedom to continue to preach such things is legally obstructed by the laws which allow all of those things. Or if they are, they certainly seem to be people on the fringes of conservatism.

Or am I getting this all wrong? Do these people actually just want to change the constitution to remove the separation of church and state? Do they think that the founders and the framers and the fathers or whoever were wrong to put that in there in the first place? Is that what they really think, and they're mostly just too afraid/savvy to actually come out and say it? If they did say it, at least I'd be a lot less confused.

 Edited to add: Where I'm from, we have our fair share of reactionary, conservative, evangelical, far-right Christian nutjobs who prevent us from even being able to open shops - during a recession! - at reasonable hours on Sundays. I just wish we had a legal statement of the separation of church and state here. But that's a whole nother rant.