...as that in reality as modeled by their brains, what they believe is the truth. I remember very well existing in such a state until so many paradoxes tore my model apart. And that was with the "benefit" of being gay, so that the paradoxes kept coming. Most Christians aren't encountering such contrary evidence. For me, it wasn't so much an epiphany of enlightened self-interest as a Lovecraftian encounter with cosmic horror. No way did I want to be gay, and I still believed it to possibly be wrong, but all the same I could no longer ignore that I was, like it or not. Becoming okay with that wasn't so much a matter of enlightenment as a final acceptance of the pragmatics of the situation: the only way I could honestly acquire anything like my mother and father have together is if I were to somehow make myself feel deep down that gay relationships are an acceptable alternative. So I started working on that. Self-interest? You bet.

But even then, for a while, I felt quite a bit of sympathy for the argument that gay partners should aim for civil unions rather than force religious groups to give up marriage as a religious identifier. I'll be happy to someday see the bigots defeated at the polls (and maybe for the first time this coming election day). But at the same time, I know from my own personal experience that the bigotry of prejudiced belief isn't at all the same thing as the bigotry of bullying. I didn't choose to be gay, but I did choose to accept being gay (but not to adopt the ultra-hedonistic lifestyle that gets served to us like some kind of a consolation prize). In the same way, many bigots did not choose to be bigots -- their beliefs are simply the reality their brain provides them -- and their choice is merely in accepting the obviousness of that reality (but not to engage in bullying).

It's a subtle point, and I don't know if I'm making it well enough. Those who advocate against gay marriage are utterly wrongheaded, but not necessarily (in any specific case) because they are failing in the act of love, but rather because their love runs into mental obstacles that exist for them but not for us. In the same way, it is almost assuredly true that our brains are putting obstacles in the way of our own acts of love. Clearing those obstacles away is more of an intellectual exercise than a moral one. The moral exercise is being willing to engage with paradoxes that evidence those obstacles when they come up. The moral consequence of being unwilling, besides the ongoing limitation on our love, is sometimes that you set up a very long, hard road back to sanity and self-acceptance when those paradoxes finally clobber you into realization.