The Family Research Council, a Christian lobbying organization founded by James Dobson, has since 1983 “advanced faith, family and freedom in public policy and public opinion.” It advances faith and family by advocating for restrictive legislation. I’m not sure how it advances freedom.

It’s statement on homosexuality begins (emphasis is mine) “Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects.”

Unnatural by definition? What could their definition of homosexual be? Is homosexual behavior supernatural?

Of course attempts to control the privilege of marriage based on what is “natural” are not new. Peggy Pascoe, the late historian and author of 'What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America' has shown how the rhetoric of what is “natural” was used to restrict marriages based on notions of racial realism, and in an essay titled “Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation” has drawn parallels to similar rhetoric used to restrict same-sex marriage: