http://www.salon.com/2012/02/08/the_making_of_gay_marriages_top_foe/Salon has a long article on the founder of NOM and one of the loudest voices on the homophobe side, Maggie Gallagher (how I don't know. She and others must've known Salon is a lefty publication). It is a holey read; the author seems to want to link certain aspects of her life together, looking for any reason for her outspokenness against homosexuality. I'm not entirely convinced of the arguments, but its an interesting read of her life nonetheless.
The author pinpoints her getting pregnant in Yale as the impetus for her conservative views (yes, she went to Yale). Gallagher, being a conservative even then, refused an abortion, but the boyfriend bailed on her just after the baby was born.
As Gallagher tells it, she and the baby’s father were close; they had been together “on the order of one year,” she says, so he might have been expected to stand by her. “My son’s father was my boyfriend at Yale,” is how she describes their relationship. But when she told him she was pregnant, right before spring break in 1982, he vanished on her. “I was in his room and he had to go do something, and I was going to fly out in a couple of hours, had to get to the airport. And the last thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll be back in 30 minutes.’ And then he wasn’t.”
He just left her sitting in his room. And that was the end of them. When summer came, Gallagher moved home to Oregon and took some classes to finish her degree. In the fall, she gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick.
The pregnancy seemed to establish a few threads in her mind that would eventually lead to her rampant homophobia (this was in the 80s, so the idea of gays raising families like nuclear couples was still foreign). The first and foremost was the importance of family, a man and a woman, in raising children, though this was dedicated more towards divorce than gays. And the dissolution of marriage, it seems, can be blamed on feminism reducing the role of men to secondary, peripheral status.
In a sense, “Enemies of Eros,” a jeremiad about the sorry state of sexual culture and gender relationships, must have been gestating since her son was born. Its author is sad that lifelong marriage is no longer an accepted norm; that many children do not grow up with fathers; that sex has been decoupled from marriage and parenthood. And she is angry at everyone she finds culpable for these changes, including “elite women, magazine editors, book publishers, screenwriters, advice columnists, and auteurs who are the moral guardians of the new generation, mentors to guide young women through the thickets of modernity into a sexual utopia that seems to be receding ever further into the horizon.”
Gallagher charges these women, sitting in “their perch atop the towers of Manhattan,” with conspiring — “conspiracy” is indeed her word — to delude women into thinking that the sexes are basically the same. But the sexes are obviously not the same, Gallagher argues. Men are different. “Sometimes they prefer a hotel room to a house in the suburbs, or beg us to exchange bodily fluids without ever exchanging phone numbers. Sometimes they do not appreciate that making a baby is making a long-term commitment you cannot just walk out on when you’re feeling unfulfilled.” Because men are so different, society developed norms to pressure men to take responsibility they might wish to avoid. The naive hope of the women’s movement, that gender roles could wither away, has only tangled ladies’ stockings in a hopeless knot: Without marriage norms, and the sex norms that go with them, men can get away with anything — all the sex they want, and no more of the housework than before.
What is odd is she isn't religious at least in the expected sense. Rather she seems utterly convinced on the importance of a nuclear family in the same way a Paultard is convinced of the gold standard. From there her ultralogical mind works out the reasons and the symptoms, from divorce to feminism to gays. That and a lifelong career in conservative journalism makes her an effective activist for her cause.
Its a huge read, and its up to you to see if you agree.
