On Tuesday, April 24, Frances Kelly asked in her Home Griddle blog, “Why does media call pro-gender measure 'anti-gay'?” This was all in the context of media treatment of a piece of legislation being processed in North Carolina.

"Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State.”  Amendment 1, North Carolina. Kelly wrote:

When it votes on Amendment One in two weeks, North Carolina will decide whether or not to uphold gender integration in marriage.  This pro-gender bill would ensure gender-diversity in families.  Rather than intentionally depriving children of either their mother or father, this measure would ensure that children have both.

However, opponents call this pro-gender language “anti-gay.”  For example, the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner called Amendment 1 “one of the toughest anti-gay measures in the country.”

Why is pro-gender language called anti-gay?

Isn’t it more accurate to consider pro-gay measures as anti-gender?

This blog, Conjugality, is pro-marriage. It exists because, in its effect, the drive to redefine marriage to enable it to encompass civil unions between same-sex couples will destroy marriage. It will simply drain it of the meaning it has in nature itself.  This argument is simply not being faced up to. The tactic of the opponents of North Carolina’s amendment – and the media generally in its opposition to those who defend the nature of marriage - is to paint them into an anti-gay box and throw as much mud at them as they can. They are ignoring the need to maintain truth in language itself – indeed this is but another wound they are inflicting on human kind.

Let us leave aside the question of the rights or wrongs of the use and abuse of sexuality and simply work this out in the context of all the things which the institution of marriage has been about since the first conjugal union of man and woman took place, of what its essence is. Perhaps then we may see some light in the suffocating darkness created by these multiple smoke screens which surround us.

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