Bill Donohue from The Catholic League faced-off with Chad Griffin of the Human Rights Campaign on CNN about President Obama's decision to support gay marriage.
Griffin began by explaining why President Obama's decision is important to gays and lesbians:
"What the President of the United States said today – the first President of the United States said today – is that he cares for them (LGBT people). He is their president, he is standing up for them and he believes that they too are equal under the law. And that is incredibly significant."
Keeping it classy, Bill Donohue took a different approach:
"Obama has always liked the idea of two men getting married. He had to change, because he wanted to become president and he said he invoked his Christian moorings. Now today he had to wiggle with that."
Donohue went on to implicitly compare gay marriage to incest, which Griffin rebuffed as ridiculous. When Piers Morgan asked Donohue what his personal problem with gay marriage was, Donohue explained:
Oh, it’s very simple. It’s absolutely very simple. I have a doctorate in sociology from NYU, and I know what the literature says. The literature is definitive. There is one gold standard, one gold standard for children. That is: there is no substitute for a marriage between a man and a woman. I want the law to discriminate against straight people who live together — I used to call it “shacking up,” but now it’s called cohabitation. I want the law to discriminate against all alternative lifestyles, against gays and unions. I want to promote and to put in a privileged position that institution of marriage between a man and a woman, which has been shown over and over to be the gold standard.
Think Progress countered Donohue's claim:
Donohue might want to revisit sociology before he makes such grandiose claims. Not a single study has compared married opposite-sex couples to married same-sex couples and found a difference in their parenting ability. Any claim otherwise is a distortion of the research, not a “gold standard.”
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