One of the best arguments I’ve heard so far on Prop. 8, the California proposition banning gay marriage that was heavily funded by church groups, was a letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 30, 2008, titled “Unholy matrimony.”
I’ve copied it here:
Unholy matrimony
Editor – As a straight Catholic woman who was married to a gay man for 25 years, I echo the questions that gay Catholics raise about the role of Catholic clergy in the passage of Proposition 8 (“Clergy’s role a wedge for many Catholics,” Nov. 21).
Prop. 8 legalizes the same religious teaching about marriage as a union of only a man and a woman that caused my gay husband to marry me. Not knowing he was gay, I witnessed him struggle as he repressed his sexual orientation in order to “do the right thing.” In the end, his struggle caused severe depression and led to our divorce. Everyone in our family suffered as a result of his following church teaching. Prop. 8 will only perpetuate this scenario, which has already damaged the marriages and faith of countless Catholic families across the country.
Wouldn’t it help strengthen the institution of marriage to enable two gay or lesbian persons who wish to establish a community of life and love to marry legally – with all the rights and responsibilities granted opposite-gender couples – and, more importantly, with a greater chance of staying together than they would if they married someone of the opposite gender?
AMITY PIERCE BUXTON, Founder, Straight Spouse Network, Oakland
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What I like about Ms. Buxton’s letter is that it renders the consequences of the proposition in personal terms.
In the broadest sense, if there are any victories in the increasing secularization of our world, especially here in the west, certainly one of them is our increasing respect for the distinct individual paths we all take.
Rather than a cookie cutter world, where our roles our prescribed for us by the niche we are born into in life, we are increasingly aware of how individual all our paths are, and respectful of each others’ life situations.
Who knows what they might have chosen, had they been born into Ms. Buxton’s life and faced her situations and choices? Or those of her ex-husband?
“Separate but equal” was the rationale of Jim Crow laws in the American South from Reconstruction through the first two thirds of the 20th century. And I’m sure those laws were popular with the electorates of those states and times, too.
But just like proposition 8 here in California in the first decade of this century, that did not make Jim Crow right. And it doesn’t make it right for a majority of California’s electorate to deprive a minority of California citizens of their rights, either.
OmbudsBen 
My mom married a gay man, too, and it was horrible. Put a huge strain on their relationship for all of the obvious reasons. He was also an alcoholic, which may or may not have been partially due to trying to fit into a culture that did not accept him as he was.
When I first got to SF I worked with a word processor from Philadelphia. He had been a typist with high level clearance for the government. A suburban dad, barbecues with the neighborhood, the whole bit — until rumors about some extracurricular activity.
Big scandal. Betrayed wife. Neighbors threatening to beat him up for betraying his family, etc. He fled on a bus out of town, headed to California, thinking LA. He was so closeted (mid 70s) he didn’t even know SF had an emerging gay community until he arrived here. In some small town enroute a bus headed to SF left first, and he got on it.
I knew several men back then with similar stories, trying to fit into a world that despised them; it’s so tragic.