If you've been reading news stories between the lines, what worries many opponents of gay marriage isn't just gay marriage, but what might happen after that legal barrier is crossed. As the Village Voice's Richard Goldstein pithily explains, they may be barking up the wrong tree:

After the Supreme Court nullified sodomy laws, both Antonin Scalia and Rick Santorum uttered the B-word. But it was the Massachusetts marriage ruling that brought this issue to the paw-front. "What about a person who loves their pet?" asked a legislator from New Hampshire. "Should we allow them to marry?" Nebraska's attorney general had a similar query: "Does that mean you have to allow a man to marry his pet?" (Decency forbade him from including women and their four-legged fancies.) A Boston rabbi put it more concretely: "What's next? Marrying a dog? Marrying your cat?" (At least he was species inclusive.)

Even Marilyn Musgrave, the Colorado Republican who wrote the federal marriage amendment, has raised the fearsome question, "Are you going to discriminate against . . . animal lovers?" To be fair, pet nuptials are not the only thing on these troubled minds. Opponents of gay marriage also worry about incest, polygamy, and, in Scalia's case, rampant masturbation. But what really gets them hot and bothered is the love that dare not speak, bark, mew, or quack its name.

Maybe this panic isn't merely symbolic; maybe it's the subconscious demanding to be heard. When dudes talk about doing it doggy-style, are they alluding to the real thing? When they call Hillary Clinton a bitch, are they paying her a compliment? If all men are dogs, what does that say about their predilections? How can we be sure that, left to their own devices, many guys wouldn't opt for Lassie or (shock! horror!) Trigger? [read the full article]

Perhaps they've all watched Gene Wilder's sequence in Woody Allen's Everything You've Always Wanted to Know about Sex*...