Demagogue

But that was before John Gibson of Fox News set me straight (no pun intended).

Gays can't have kids — other than going to the abandoned kids store and getting one or two, or borrowing sperm from someone with more sperm than brains — so by definition they're out of the marriage game.

But I still have a biological question, and I hope Dr. Gibson can help me out: once Adam and Steve have gotten their sperm from a straight guy, don't they still need an egg and a uterus?

By the way, getting the sperm shouldn't be difficult. If the requirement is to have more sperm than brains, I believe most straight men should qualify, at least according to the straight women I've spoken to. But I'm unclear on the "borrowing" part; most men, I assume (although perhaps I'm wrong) don't really want their sperm back--apart from that guy in Illinois who sued a woman for impregnating herself with his semen after fellatio.

Another by the way: I'm sure my adopted friends will be happy to know they came from the "abandoned kids store." Though if marriage is the way society thinks children should be raised, it's not clear to me why kids who have been adopted should be denied the raising that they need just because their parents are biologically incapable of creating a child together. Think of all those poor kids from China on the Upper East Side. A couple of them were adopted by a friend of mine who is paralyzed and literally cannot father a child. Oddly, he was permitted to marry the woman he loved, and they now have formed a family--or so they thought--with their adopted kids. And then there are the kids who are born out of wedlock or whose parents divorce; when the custodial parent settles down with someone of the same sex, those kids also get shut out of "the marriage game." In a way, Gibson's view is a return to tradition; if you look in the widely used West case reporters, you will find that "Bastards and Bastardy" was a major heading in West's "key number" system in the older reports; though it has been replaced by "Children out of Wedlock," it's still there for those who want to research the legal rights denied to children who had the poor judgment to be born in the wrong way. Let's hear it for our cherished tradition of legal discrimination!