Jon Cowan, president and co-founder of Third Way, a "moderate think tank", and Evan Wolfson, founder and executive director of Freedom [for some] to Marry have a commentary in the Los Angeles Times in which they try to convince Republicans that all of the cool kids – er, cool Republicans – support neutering marriage.

They start out with the "Pledge to America".

Though the pledge gives a perfunctory nod to "traditional marriage" (in a single line in a list of things, like "families," that it supports ), explicit opposition to marriage for same-sex couples is conspicuous in its absence. The document never uses the word "gay" (or "homosexual") — a stark contrast to past party platforms, which have made opposition to gay equality a centerpiece of their social agenda.

That's it? Mentioning "traditional marriage" isn't enough to paint the picture? Well, they go on to cite what they think is more evidence that a deep, lasting shift is happening...

The GOP, in large part, isn't displaying its usual anti-gay election-year demagoguery, and not just in the "pledge."

What exactly is considered "anti-gay"? This is a common tactic of marriage neutering advocates. They want the average person to picture mobs of people beating people because they identify as gay, and say, "I'm not anti-gay!" Then the marriage neutering advocates do a bait and switch and equate that definition of "anti-gay" with "defends bride+groom requirement in marriage".

As recently as 1995, a Republican-controlled Congress was holding hearings investigating "homosexual recruitment" and the "promotion" of homosexuality.

How is it "anti-gay" to hold hearings into such allegations? Surely investigations would reveal the truth that such allegations were utterly unfounded, right?

During the George W. Bush administration, the party used its fervent opposition to marriage for gay and lesbian couples as a get-out-the-vote strategy, encouraging more than a dozen anti-gay state ballot initiatives geared at driving turnout in the 2004 election and engineering repeated efforts to pass an amendment to the Constitution.

See? Defending marriage is "anti-gay" to these authors. They are referring to initiatives that confirmed what most people intuitively know – that the legal definition of marriage should be one that is bride+groom.

I note that they fail to mention that the GOP used it is a strategy in California in 2008 to turn out votes for that great Republican, Obama.

Anyway, we're supposed to not vote. We're supposed to sit back and let the marriage neutering advocates vote. I thought these people were all for getting out the vote? I guess that's more for dead people and Mexican citizens.

This year is the first election year in recent history in which anti-gay rhetoric has been significantly muted: No state is facing an anti-gay initiative on the ballot, and marriage has not been a focus of the national conservative agenda.

Um, that's because most of the states already have adopted their laws and amendments defending marriage, and because fiscal matters are taking precedence. Really. This is like saying people in Oakland no longer care about football because they stopped trying to lure the Raiders back from Los Angeles, or that Chile no longer cares about making wine because they've been focusing on rescuing miners.

They go on to cite that – surprise, surprise – that the GOP is a big tent, and there are homosexual people in the GOP and they're coming out! They cite Ted Olson (supporting the neutering of marriage, not coming out).

Cindy McCain and former First Lady Laura Bush have both spoken out in support of [neutering] marriage.

In August, Ken Mehlman, former Republican National Committee chairman and campaign manager for Bush in the 2004 election, revealed that he is gay and supports the freedom to marry.

The editors must have taken out a lot more names. Hey, guess what? I support the freedom to marry, too. What I don't support is neutering marriage into something completely new, especially through judicial fiat.

Mehlman hosted a fundraiser in support of Olson's lawsuit, with a guest list that would have been unheard of five years ago. It included numerous well-known Republicans such as former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, former Bush White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace and former RNC counsel Benjamin Ginsberg.

Clutch the pearls!

Perhaps even more telling, the proudly right-wing GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas appeared for the first time at a reception for the Log Cabin Republicans, a leading gay GOP organization. Cornyn had turned down invitations and even contributions from the Log Cabin group in the past.

Are those straws firmly grasped, yet?

What's driving this insiders' insurrection? Perhaps a sense that a libertarian-leaning belief in fully extending the freedom to marry to all Americans does not, in fact, clash with a conservative commitment to holding together the social fabric, as marriage entails personal responsibility and social stability.

Yeah, we all know that the social ills prevalent in the "homosexual community" will vanish if they can only get a state-issued marriage license. Faux monogamy will become real monogamy, promiscuity will drop, depression levels will drop, everyone will stop getting STIs, mental illness rates will drop, substance abuse will drop, homo-cide and other forms of domestic violence will drop. They've just been waiting for the state to mandate that the higher earner will owe alimony to the lower earner (and domestic partnerships don't count, even though they do that)... once they have that, all of those other things will take care of themselves.

They then go on to poll dance.

For Republicans, it means they could become less moored to their socially conservative base and may get back in touch with the cautious but forward-looking American political center that is vital to GOP hopes of cobbling together a governing majority.

If that the "political center" that these guys are thinking of is forward-looking, so is someone who is diving out of an airplane without a parachute. I'm less concerned about being consider forward-looking than being Constitutionally-focused.

They then go on to cite fauxmentum.

Look, I know it is frustrating that you haven't been able to get Obama to fully endorse marriage neutering with his words, but let's face it - the Democrats are pretty much in the tank for homosexuality advocates on most issues. Your attempt to bamboozle Republicans is weak.

Let's look at reality again:

1) Men and women are different. Even most of the people who try to deny this demonstrate that they understand this to be true. After all, if men and women were not different, all, or at least three, of the terms in "LGBT" would have no meaning.

2) The paring of a man and a woman is different than the pairing of two men or two women. This automatically follows if #1 is true. But we know that the pairing of a man and a woman is the only kind of pairing that is able to naturally produce new citizens (who, unlike the adults, do not consent to the relationship), even if not all do. This alone is enough to give the state more interest in the pairing of a man and a woman.

3) Men and women are different in personal relationships. Again, even the people who try to deny this demonstrate that they understand this to be true. If that difference matters enough to someone in picking a lover, how can it not matter when it comes to the parent-child relationship?

4) State licensing of bride+groom pairings provides children with a role model, guardian, and bonding partner from each of the two sexes that comprise all of society, legally bound to each other as well as the children; generally, this is good for children.

5) It is constitutional, moral, common, and necessary to treat different kinds of relationships differently.

6) One need not believe homosexual behavior, relationships, or people to be harmful, sinful, or inferior to accept any or all of #1-5.

We all have an interest is shaping our culture, including our laws. Let's not abdicate our responsibilities and allow others to decide these things for us. The truth is, Republican leaders and most people in the party are just as much in favor of protecting the rights of homosexual people as they are in protecting the rights of anyone else. Most of us believe that people should be treated equally under the law based on what they do. But like President Obama, we don't believe a brideless or groomless pairing is a marriage; we don't think states have the same interest in nonmarital relationships are they do in marital relationships, and we don't think federal judges should neuter state marriage licensing.