Mr. Kalb’s idea is a sine qua non for change. In the end, people have to get up and do something. “Carpe diem!” (I quote from my too often prideful but sometimes brilliant ancestors.) I’ve acted on his idea; it will take only a few minutes. Think how much you would welcome applause from supporters in your audience as you challenged the powerful establishment. The Senator is just like you and I.

uhh, what’s wrong with gay people? if everyone’s supposed to be equal, why shouldn’t they have rights? if you don’t want rights for gay people (who are within your species) then why not retract rights for blacks and women too, that would leave rich white men in charge..oh wait, we’re already there

Indeed, why not give pedophiles or better yet rapists and murderers rights? They all are after all human and what they do has been around since the dawn of history.

Space Vixen, your very first words serve only to set up a straw man to (implicitly) knock down, pointlessly.  Keep setting them up if that’s your cup of tea, while the rest of us deal with reality. 

No one said there was something wrong with homosexual men in the sense in which you sarcastically meant your “irony,” namely “We’re all perfect and they’re all defective.”  The people who oppose the homosexual agenda (an agenda of forcing society to pretend homosexuality is normal, psychologically healthy, and spiritually clean) have moral defects. They also happen to include practicing homosexuals among their ranks, ones having the honesty and integrity to realize that capitulation to the program of the homosexual lobby does not serve society’s broad interests, interests whereof they see the value for themselves, and which they have the moral fiber and moral judgement to place above themselves. 

We all have our defects, homosexuals having the misfortune to have been cursed with grave ones indeed and the rest of us likewise though perhaps different grave ones (varying in kind and in degree) such as dishonesty, sloth, gluttony, selfishness, covetousness, ingratitude, cruelty, stupidity, alcoholism, poor personal hygiene, having a taste for Schadenfreude, neurosis, having a greater or lesser inclination toward sexual perversion such as child porn, etc.  We don’t all attempt to impose broad acceptance of our defects on society but instead rectify them where we can or, where we can’t, hide them — keep them private and to ourselves — out of a sense of shame; of decency; of right and wrong.

What we who oppose their agenda won’t accept is the claim that their particular defect or set of defects which give rise to their homosexual lifestyle are not defects but part of normalness, good character, and good health.  Whether these defects be inborn or not (probably mostly inborn in many; certainly not entirely inborn in all) doesn’t impose the acceptance by society of the lifestyle they engender, any more than did Jeffrey Dahmer’s, Ted Bundy’s, or John Wayne Gacy’s defects, inborn or not, or any more than would those of a Times Square flasher-exhibitonist, inborn or not, or any more than would mine if I happened to have the defect, inborn or not, of liking to pick my nose in public. Homosexuality has a place. Let it remain there, where it has always lurked since time immemorial: out of the light of day. It is indecent. No one cares what they do among themselves. But I don’t want it rammed down my throat.     

“If everyone’s supposed to be equal, why shouldn’t they [all] have [the same] rights?”

First of all, Vixen, because of the way in which you’re trying to use the truth that all men are created equal to justify homosexuality, you need to hear another truth — everyone isn’t equal. Wife beaters aren’t equal to good husbands, or child molesters to decent men.  An amputee isn’t equal to a person who is whole.  A man isn’t equal to a woman.  A grown-up isn’t equal to a child.  A college graduate isn’t equal to a high-school graduate.  Bill & Hillary aren’t equal to people who possess integrity. 

Everyone is, however, equal before the law in principle and with the appropriate exceptions everyone knows about for different sexes, parenthood/childhood, etc.  Homosexual men do have rights, the exact same ones as everyone else.

As for your observation that rich white men are in charge, the problem does indeed stem from the particular ones who are: voilà the cause of the gravest of today’s societal ills, for which we can lay blame at the feet of rich white men totally lacking in intelligence and/or integrity such as every male member of the Kennedy family, Pres. Bush, Bill Clinton, William F. Buckley, Jr., Donald Trump, Ted Turner, Ross Perot, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros, Jaan Wenner, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Bob Bartley, and thousands, nay tens-of-thousands more of nitwits or outright vermin just like them.