Point 1.

I have encountered this argument many times and, since I am not supposed to cite my feelings, will simply state that it has no merit. Loving the lord your God does not mean blindly accepting all the incorrect scriptural interpretations and later superstitions that have been attached to him. Period. American fundamentalism seeks to offer its adherents the ability to pull their chaotic, spouse-beating, drug-using lives together by providing beneficent order in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and that's a wonderful thing that's the foundation of its success. But order for its own sake, taken shallowly and without regard for the true good it steps on, is simply not religion. It's social militarism. Citing 'love your God' against same-sex marriage grossly oversteps, and in fact contradicts, the beneficial orderliness of God's love. It reduces potentially good-serving lives to chaotic life-long excursions into futile, perpetual guilt and isolation.

2. This is a very prominent social straw man. I didn't make it.

3. My loving inclinations, carrying the essence of God's own love, are completely different from my power-building and mammon-oriented inclinations. As you know.

4. Agreed.

5. Love adapts to many different situations, but the bridge between its different expressions is strong and unitary. Love is not something ineffable and esoteric. Religious scholars get very slap-happy about re-dividing it up into eros, agape and philia, but that Greek taxonomy of the loves went too far and produced its own veil of illusion. Sexual attraction can exist in a form separated from love, but other than that, one's intent to cherish, value, foster, support, and befriend others in a mutualistic way is simply love, and when it is appropriate to deepen that with mutual sexual expression in a committed partnership, this in turn fosters the commitment that allows you to remain a life-long partner with someone. You will notice that your favorite co-worker from 1993 will not be there at your bedside looking after you when you are ill in 2013. If my partner from prior to 1980 is there looking after me, because we fused in sexual union and formed a family, does that make our relationship not-love? I could write a book here about how love per se and not liquid is the main thing transferred in sex among couples who are married in spirit, but it would be too long for this venue.

I always say that the sacrifices made by care-giving same-sex partners during the AIDS crisis finally proved to the world - to all but those who were most unwilling to learn - that the love in gay relationships was of the noblest, most enlightened and most Godly form. If anyone wishes to try to blow that house down with intellectual puffing, then let him blow.

6. Miracles are merely waivers of the laws of physics. They are readily plausible. Fatal self-contradictions within God's proclaimed values are not miracles. They are merely human self-deceptions. There is no appeal to feelings in this. It is like mathematics.

I know that conscientious boylovers who don't want to yield to boy-abusing temptations have a vested interest in following the most simple, rigid, and narrow standard of what God wants from sexuality. Maybe I am wrong to tamper with this by coming in here with my old habit of defending my relationship and those of my respected friends. The Lord does enjoin us not to lead people astray accidentally, and perhaps I should pretend that my love has been sacrificed to an idol, so that you do not sin. But everyone wrestles with temptation, even the married, and I feel we would be in the most robust situation if we could make a true separation of what was beneficent in a godly way from what was merely self-deluding and self-indulgent.