Quote One, from California: "[O]ne of the arguments that the anti-gay-marriage side has increasingly turned to outside the courtroom is that allowing same-sex marriage would hurt heterosexual marriage. At the pretrial hearing, Judge Walker kept asking Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending Proposition 8, how exactly it did so. “I’m asking you to tell me,” he said at last, “how it would harm opposite-sex marriages.”

“All right,” Cooper said.

“All right,” Walker said. “Let’s play on the same playing field for once.”

There was a pause—it seemed like a long one to people in the courtroom, though it was probably only a few seconds. And Cooper said, “Your Honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Which confirms my very strong intuition that the animating pathos against same sex marriage is based in simple fear of the unknown, fear of the misunderstood, fear of the Other.

Quote Two, from Degobah: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

I know that quote gets overused, but it has the virtue of being very true.