How Maggie Gallagher's Unwed Pregnacy and Hatred of Men Created an Anti-Gay Marriage Zealot

I have long believed that the majority of the most outspoken and vitriolic opponents of same sex marriage are in fact seriously psychologically disturbed individuals and that their anti-gay animus stems from their own personal demons and the continuing mental and emotional damage they suffered in their formative years from being raised in religious extremist homes. Some, like Robert Knight and Peter LaBarbera are in my opinion self-loathing closeted gays who hold nothing but unadulterated hatred against gays who have been able to move on in their lives and accept that God - if there is one - gay. And then there are others who seem to have been severely damaged bu their own life experiences who have funneled their rage and anger against LGBT citizens who they believe threaten a fantasy world that exists only in their own minds. Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage and hate merchant and liar extraordinaire is a case in point. Salon has a lengthy article on Gallagher and it is pretty unflattering. Indeed, one can easily conclude that her anti-gay propaganda and hate trace directly back to the fact that she got knocked up in college, was thrown over by her "boyfriend," and has been seeking vengeance ever sense. Rather than attack LGBT equality under the civil laws, in my opinion, Gallagher needs serious mental health care intervention. Here are some highlights from the Salon article:

Today, they have different memories of the relationship — how long they had been dating, how close they were — but on one fact they agree: 30 years ago this spring, months before she was supposed to graduate, Gallagher discovered she was pregnant. Then, as now, Yale students did not get pregnant — or if they did, no baby came of it. But Gallagher knew she would have this baby.

Counterfactual history is a dangerous business, but it seems fair to say that Gallagher’s was the non-marriage that changed the world. If that sophomore cad had married Gallagher, she might never have become a writer. “I don’t know what I would have done,” she tells me. “I became a writer because I had a baby and had to make money.” And what she writes about is same-sex marriage: why it’s bad for children, bad for America, simply bad.

Gallagher’s unplanned pregnancy — so great a rupture in a young conservative woman’s sense of life’s proper path, coming at so young an age — focused her politics, and gave her traditional-family conservatism a messianic tinge. I]in 1989, when Patrick was 7, Gallagher published a book that remains startling for its combination of sadness and anger; it’s hard to believe any author can sound so hopelessly disappointed before the age of 30. In a sense, “Enemies of Eros,” a jeremiad about the sorry state of sexual culture and gender relationships, must have been gestating since her son was born. Its author is sad that lifelong marriage is no longer an accepted norm; that many children do not grow up with fathers; that sex has been decoupled from marriage and parenthood. And she is angry at everyone she finds culpable for these changes, . . . .

Gallagher writes, “Men need a role in the family. What men need, loath though we are to utter the word, is a sex role.” Gallagher approvingly offers the example, drawn from a Wall Street Journal article, of one Millie Stephens, “a 28-year-old manager for Bell of Pennsylvania who earns $46,000 a year.” Her husband, Carl, a state trooper, earns $31,000 a year, and “to disguise her salary, they put all of her earnings in the bank and live off his income.” “Mrs. Stephens” also washes the dishes and irons her husband’s shirts. “I don’t mind treating him like a man,” she says.

Reading Gallagher’s portion of “Debating Same-Sex Marriage” and watching numerous clips of her debates, what surprises me is how little Gallagher talks about gay people, or even gayness. Gallagher’s opposition to gay marriage seems to have very little to do with gay people, indeed with people at all. What really excites her is a depersonalized idea of Marriage: its essence, its purity, its supposedly immutable definition.

The great trauma of Gallagher’s youth, her unplanned pregnancy and subsequent alienation from the father of her child, was rooted in failing to understand that sex and procreation are connected. It is understandable that, having grasped the truth, she is intent on emphasizing its importance. So it follows that gay marriage and, above all, gay parenthood, more than gay people themselves, presents a real challenge to her belief system. Same-sex marriage advocates offend her hard-won wisdom in two ways. First, they imply that sex and love can in fact be separate from procreation, and no less valid for it. Second, and perhaps more troubling for Gallagher, the increasingly visible column of attentive, loving gay parents — gay male parents in particular — mocks her own romantic choices.

For Gallagher, the principal problem with gay couples is not the act of sodomy: It’s that they cannot be a mother and a father. Gallagher believes that what is best for any child is to be raised by its natural mother and father — what happens when Marriage succeeds — and any law that honors an alternative arrangement is thus harmful. Adoptive parents may succeed in raising a child well, single parents may succeed, but they are both inferior to biological mother and father, the paradigm that Marriage has always supported, throughout history.

Gallagher is unwilling to make any predictions of what doom will befall families after the legalization of same-sex marriage. She just has faith that marriage, the central institution of good child-rearing, will be weakened if same-sex couples are allowed its prestige and protections. When I ask her if any kind of evidence could change her mind, she says that in theory such evidence could exist, but it would be awfully hard to come by: “Yes, you could produce the evidence that children are just as well off in same-sex couples, and that the change isn’t bad for the institution of marriage as a whole.

And even if somehow the evidence showed, conclusively, that same-sex marriage were good for children? Gallagher would still be dissatisfied: “Nothing could make me call a same-sex couple a marriage, because that’s not what I believe a marriage is.”

Gallagher’s people are dying off; her enemies are breeding. Meanwhile, the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy proceeded without incident last year: a non-event that surely bodes well for same-sex marriage, one more aspect of gay men’s and lesbians’ full inclusion in civil society. One prominent ally of Gallagher’s told me that the “fight is over.” There will be minor victories to come, but “we’re going to lose,” the ally said.

Those would seem to be the hard facts, the evidence on which pure thought would operate. But for Gallagher these facts are temporal, contingent and ultimately meaningless.

At the risk of sounding crude, Maggie Gallagher - who by the way NEVER uses her Hindu husband's last name when shaking down the weak minded Christianists - committed what her Church describes a sinful act, got herself pregnant in college and made what she obviously sees was a huge mistake. Sadly, she's never gotten over it and now seeks to inflict her bitterness on the the world at large and on gays in particular. Compounding the problem is her brainwashing - and likely self-loathing due to her unwed motherhood - associated with her Catholic upbringing. Having been raised Catholic myself, I know only too well the mental health damage the Church can do. Therefore, in my opinion, Gallagher needs to get serious mental health care to exorcise her personal demons and get out of everyone else's life. She's screwed up her own and now wants to screw up the lives of others.