When homophobes are reduced to picking on families they see on the subway

FOF's Glenn T. Stanton

To say the NY vote for marriage equality has thrown conservatives for a loop is an understatement.

All of the high-brow bullshit and self-righteous verbiage about traditional morality seems to have gone out of the window and is replaced by just basic meanness.

Take Focus on the Family's pseudo expert Glenn T. Stanton for example.

In an online issue of the conservative National Review, he told of an incident of a mother on a subway - who he probably thought was lesbian even though it makes no difference - playing an innocent game with her child:

My daughter and I were in Manhattan over this weekend so I could do some research at the Met. Waves of people were coming into the city for Sunday’s big gay-pride march, where they could celebrate the Empire State’s new same-sex-marriage law. We sat behind some of them on the train, three young women with a precious, excited toddler girl in tow. The very evident leader of the clan was the patriarch. Adorned as if she might be an actor portraying a hip-hop teen from Cleveland, she had her meticulous corn-rows tucked under a backwards navy-blue flat-billed ballcap, a matching wife beater revealing a mural of tats on her arms, shoulders, and back. Baggy jeans rode low, leading to her construction boots with untied laces dangling free.

She was the only one of the adult threesome that interacted with the child, mindlessly uttering reassuring words like “Daddy will be right back” or “Sit over here by Daddy.”

You see, this is one of the things that most concerns me about the legal institutionalization of genderless marriage and parenting. We are told that nothing will really change with such laws; people who really love each other will just be able to enter really meaningful, legally protected relationships.

My God, that was stupid.

I know I should be more mature here in my criticism of Stanton's absolutely ridiculous tirade on this subway incident and the subject of marriage equality, but I can't.

In the first place, Stanton didn't even know a thing about the child or the parent.

Secondly I don't recall anywhere in his piece did Stanton identify himself as the father of the child nor any indication that he was kicking in child support for this family.

To put it mildly,  it really wasn't his business what the two were doing.

It's just the basic essence of right-wing self-righteous idiocy which is channeled throughout Stanton's piece. And for that matter, almost all of their arguments against marriage equality.

The cynic in me suspects that Stanton wrote the piece to get some easy money. After all,  it is extremely lucrative to be a conservative "critic" or "senior analyst," or  "expert" on morality.  There are plethoras of organizations, magazines, and radio shows just begging to dole the money to any Tom, Dick, or Glenn out to wave the banner of morality, even if that banner is tattered and moth-eaten.

But between you and me, Glenn, I hope you spend whatever money you made on that piece of garbage on something good for your own family.

Why bother denigrating other families if yours can't benefit?