There Will Always Be Opposition to Equality

From Australia comes this opinion piece by John Dickson, director of the Centre for Public Christianity and a senior research fellow at Macquarie University. His point is that people often “believe what they want to believe, often in defiance of fact and logic.”

Conservatives are very resistant to accepting the growing body of evidence revealing physiological factors behind sexual orientation. No ''gay gene'' has been found but many specialists think the data suggests that homosexuality, bi-sexuality, polyamory and other sexual orientations are natural inclinations not simple lifestyle choices.

However, instead of grappling with the data and developing other arguments for traditional sexual ethics, some conservatives simply deny the evidence, dismiss it as a conspiracy of the gay lobby or cling to the absence of evidence for a ''gay gene''.

There are some people who are going to fight against full marriage equality no matter what. If you can figure out that the person you’re arguing with is one of those, it is better to save your breath. But there are people who can open their minds to full marriage equality. The shift we’ve been seeing in our favor is not merely the result of new generations. There are those who didn’t support equality in the past but have reconsidered and can now be counted as allies.