This, Friends, Is What We Call Graciously Accepting Defeat

You know, after the highest court in the land hands you yet another defeat, you think you'd shake hands and admit that maybe, just maybe, you'd lost this one battle. But that's not the custom of opponents of same-sex marriage in the District, who took this week's Supreme Court decision not to hear an appeal on marriage equality as a, well, declaration of war.

"This law was forced down the church's throat and what the Supreme Court has set up is the greatest civil war between the church and the gay community," said Rev. Anthony Evans to the Washington Blade yesterday. "And let me just state for the record, we don't want that fight. We love our gay brothers and sisters. But if the Supreme Court is not going to acknowledge the fact that we have a right as religious people to have a say-so in the framework of religious ethics for our culture and society, then we reject the Supreme Court on this issue."

But there's more! The Blade also quotes Evans admitting that he and fellow marriage equality opponents lobbied Congress to strip D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton of her House vote, which she lost two weeks ago.

"[O]ur first action was to make sure that Eleanor didn't get a vote as punishment for her wholehearted support for same-sex marriage in this city and also for her to ignore the black religious community. There is a consequence to her actions. That was one of them," said Evans to the Blade.

Now, this isn't the first time that opponents of marriage equality have gone slightly batty with the language they choose to use. After the D.C. Council voted to approve same-sex marriage in late 2009, Ward 5 ANC Commissioner Bob King intoned, "God's war has just started." A month later, Bishop Harry Jackson and a group or self-proclaimed "moral and cultural watchmen" warned Congress that if it failed to act, "there will be political consequences to pay."

But don't worry, gay brothers and sisters, underneath all that talk of war and vengeance is nothing but warm and fuzzy love, the type that you feel for someone that is so important to you that you just have to deny them basic civil rights granted to everyone else. That type of love, you know? They same type I feel for my own soon-to-be heterosexual union, in which my fiancee, who I love so dearly, will have to give up her right to vote and work because I just love her that much. That type of love.

If this is how Rev. Evans and his fellow opponents of same-sex marriage express love, can you imagine them when they get mad?

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