The making of gay marriage’s greatest foe

Maggie Gallagher has a very personal reason for her fight against gay marriage, said Mark Oppenheimer in Salon.com. While studying at Yale in the early 1980s, she became pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. When Gallagher broke the news to him, he vanished. “The last thing he said was, ‘I’ll be back in 30 minutes.’ And then he wasn’t.” If that sophomore had stuck around and helped raise their son, Patrick, her life would have taken a very different path. “I became a writer because I had a baby and had to make money.” What she writes and campaigns about is the threat same-sex marriage poses to America. Her problem isn’t with homosexuality; it’s that “children need a mom and a dad.” In 2008, she led the effort to pass California’s ballot initiative banning gay marriage, and in 2009 helped repeal a same-sex marriage law in Maine. For Gallagher, gay marriage is the ultimate symbol of the sexual revolution, which she blames for her own unplanned pregnancy and failed relationship. “[As] a girl, I was taught [to] separate sex from reproduction,” she says. “Same-sex marriage is the end point, the institutionalization of this view of sex and marriage, and it is false.”

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