OP-ED: Gay rights opponents' last argument

You may remember the episode of "Seinfeld" in which George Costanza struggles to find a way to break up with the woman he's dating without hurting her feelings. "It's not you," he tells her. "It's me." After decades of saying gay people were depraved and deviant, a bunch of dangerous predators out to recruit children and destroy families, in the last few years those opposed to equal rights for gay people have retreated to a very different message. It's not you, they tell gay Americans. It's us. It's true that you can still find some people on the fringe who will rail against homosexuality as an inherent evil. But watch the mainstream debate, from newspapers to television to the Supreme Court, and what you see are conservatives arguing that the problem isn't gay people themselves, it's how straight people are affected by them.