While I respect the arguments put forth, I've yet to hear an argument against gay marriage that I found convincing.

1. Marriage is a traditional mechanism to protect children (and women?), and has worked well for two millennia.

This argument is the one most attractive to me as a conservative. But there are many fallacies.

A. First, heterosexual marriage is now unstable and often brief – and it’s because of the easy availability of divorce. The most effective way to return to a traditional marriage-based society is therefore to ban divorce. Banning gay marriage has little to no effect – but few of those against gay marriage would dare suggest taking the more effective step of banning divorce. It strikes me as conservatives wanting to talk the talk, but not walk the walk.

B. Second, marriage is not about children -- banning gay marriage creates the bizarre result where two people who would never want children cannot marry because of the effect that their marriage might have on their non-existent children.

C. Third, if marriage were about children, we could take steps to make marriages more effective for raising them, such as tests for potential parents. We don’t take these steps because we value individual freedoms – but why value them sometimes but not others?

D. Finally, for gay couples who do want children, banning gay marriage simply means that they raise those children in a legally-unrecognized and less-stable relationship.

2. "Our social order -- and our civil code -- comes primarily from our religious institutions." Therefore, because we're a Protestant-Christian nation, and Protestants do not allow gay marriage, neither can the law.

Our laws are not basically religious in nature -- not even our marriage laws. (Just to take the easiest example, women need no longer obey their husbands.)

Moreover, if we were to base our laws on religion, whose religion? Many Judeo-Christian groups actively allow gay marriage. We first have to make a religious decision -- that the Baptists are "right," but the Unitarians are not. That Orthodox Jews have the correct religious beliefs, but Reform Jews don't. America doesn’t work that way.

Put another way, why should a gay couple go to a church, get married in the eyes of God, and then be denied a license by the state? Moreover, why on Earth should the state base that denial on religious principals?

3. A change in the civil code will force a change in religious institutions, and churches will have to endorse gay marriage.

First Amendment. Religious institutions can -- right now in 2009 -- refuse to marry anyone. Don't want to marry two black people in your KKK-based church? Hey, that's evil -- but it is your constitutional right to refuse. The Henry VIII example is important. Henry VIII could tell the churches how to practice their religion because there was no First Amendment to stop him. We…have one.

Public accommodations are different, of course – and no one should have the right to discriminate. I see nothing wrong with that – some people didn’t want to open up lunch counters to blacks, either (and some claimed they had religious beliefs that stopped them from doing so). Wasn’t right then, and isn’t right now.

4. Conservatives oppose change, and therefore any push for change will be resisted because it's "coercive."

I do understand this argument from an emotional perspective -- no one wants to be pushed around -- but it carries no logical weight.

The "let people, not judges, choose" argument is one that initially carried some weight with me, though judicial activism has never been a one-sided affair. I'd rather see gay marriage come about by a majority vote -- and as the tide is turning, I think more and more states will do it that way. (Though I hope conservatives don’t respond to such votes by going to court.)

In any event, the courts have a fundamental role in our society, to protect the rights of minorities. That's why Brown v. Board was legally-justifiable, and it's why the gay marriage courts are as well.

5. Gay marriage is tied up with an effort to achieve overall tolerance of homosexuality.

True, people who believe in gay marriage also tend to believe that gays are human beings who deserve equal rights and equal treatment. People who oppose gay marriage also often think that there is something "wrong" about being gay. So gays are fighting both to convince others that they're just normal, ordinary people AND for the right to be treated equally. But, at bottom, they want the rights, and that doesn’t require anyone being happy about it.

6. Gays don't really need marriage to be whole, so this is about getting government recognition.

Discrimination is wrong -- and until gays have full marriage rights, there's something not-quite-right about a "separate but equal" arrangement, even if we had one. But we don’t -- civil marriage is NOT just a title or a governmental stamp of approval. It changes how you can buy a house, adopt children, visit in the hospital. It changes your taxes, changes the disposition of your property when you die. It's real money out of your pocket and real moments in your life when you are unprotected – because your partner of 50 years is considered by law to be little more than a stranger to you. It’s not theoretical.

All told, I understand these arguments for conservative opposition -- but they strike me as a combination of logical fallacies, errors of belief, and simple misunderstandings of the law. As such, I'm hopeful that in time conservatives will come to understand that their views -- no matter how earnestly felt -- are on the wrong side of history.