"My advice to the marriage movement: educate, speak, reach out. Stop the litigating. Resist the impulse to revel in victimhood. It may be justified and I certainly know how it feels, but it doesn't change any minds. That's what we have to re-focus on. And that's the only reason we have had the success we have had. Patience, diligence, charity: these are what a civil rights movement needs to stand for."
and more recently
"Both supporters and opponents have asked for a judicial ruling on whether the initiative can stand. My own view is that it should stand, and the court should decline to reverse it. We lost. They won in a fair fight. No whining."
and (even worse)
"The LDS [Mormon] church has every right to lobby for the public law to reflect their religious truths, and if the majority of others agree, there is not much a minority of gay people can do about it."*
What he doesn't mention here is that it took a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the laws making interracial marriage illegal, and that this was three years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It is hard to figure out his aversion to — and his blatant ignoring of — the constitutional process that has figured so prominently in establishing minority and individual rights in this country. I know he is British (Britain has no constitution), living in America, and not an American citizen, but there is something else confusedly strange going on with him. (Being a gay, conservative Catholic? Who knows.)
But being a psychologist is outside my "pay grade".
Updates
(11/19/2008): Since I first posted this, Andrew has posted Dissents of the Day, which at least quotes some readers with a knowledge of constitutional history and law and their significance for minority rights.
But he still calls them "dissents": opinions on the "other side". I suppose even creationist bloggers, who of course have as much of a free-speech right as anyone, could post comments from evolutionary biologists, the dissenters in that case.
(11/20/2008): A meager inking appears in Faint Andrew. One can tell he has not read the California Supreme Court's 150+ pages of majority opinion delivered on May 15th.
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* The first part of this last quote is true, of course. The last part is pure baloney.
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