The issue of same-sex marriage, newly illuminating Gay lives for people who long preferred to see us only dimly, has focused the disparity between Gay and straight America in bold relief. Recently, an influential cadre of law professors has used this disparity in status and understanding to mount a full-scale attack on emergent marriage equality laws and state antidiscrimination paradigms generally – at least insofar as such antidiscrimination paradigms are applied to Gays. What is most alarming is that these privileged law professors, ostensibly straight and typically unable to absent themselves from the attendant privileged status of that condition, peddle their sweeping attack on Gay equality as a gift. They insist that their proposals to give religionists special rights to discriminate against Gays, by allowing state actors and private citizens in the general stream of commerce to refuse on “religious conscience” grounds to facilitate same-sex marriages in defiance of state or local antidiscrimination laws, will make Gays’ precarious citizenship somehow less so.

In this chapter, I engage their arguments, expose them for what they are (heteroarchal reversals), and refute them. Fortunately for someone in my position, the most elaborate explications of these arguments have been published in one place, Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts, the recent book of essays edited by Douglas Laycock, Anthony R. Picarello, Jr., and Robin Fretwell Wilson, which purports to offer compromise solutions that will allow Gay people access to the civil status of marriage while allowing religious objectors to exercise unfettered religious conscience. Unfortunately, despite these stated aspirations, the work represents the rampant structural liberalism currently eroding equality at every turn.