Gayphobia in the flesh

Evidently, they can't help themselves. Behold the "insights" of president wannabe Newt Gingrich on same-sex marriage: “I believe that marriage is between a man and woman. It has been for all of recorded history and I think this is a temporary aberration that will dissipate. I think that it is just fundamentally goes against everything we know.” Incredible. Why, oh why, are these people so terrified of gays? Why must America be relentlessly subjected to their medieval dogma about homosexuality? For all of ancient Rome's shortcomings (and, beginning with slavery, there were too many to count), how is it that nearly 3,000 years ago the average Roman was more sophisticated about and accepting of homosexuality than some present day Republicans? It staggers the mind. In classical antiquity, there wasn't even a single Latin or Greek word for what we now define as gay. "In the ancient world so few people cared to categorize their contemporaries on the basis of the gender to which they were erotically attracted that no dichotomy to express this distinction was in common use", wrote the late James Boswell, a prominent Yale historian. Newt and his paranoid compatriots truly need to get a life. They can start by just shutting up about gays and leaving them (and the rest of us) alone.