Way back in the olden thymes, it used to be said that a man was defined by his views on abortion and Israel. The former was all about IQ. Understanding the downstream ramifications of widespread use of abortion as a means of birth control requires a supple mind, something rare amongst abortion advocates. The latter issue was all about morality. Israel is about understanding the moral difference between a man that shoves an old women in the way of bus and a man that shoves an old women out of the way of bus. If you think both are men that shove old women, you side with the Arabs.

These days, the issue that separates the the wheat from the chaff is homosexual marriage. The moral side is easy to see, but it is different from the Israel question. Liberal fanatics use the issue to segregate themselves from normal people. It is a crude, simplistic morality, but that’s how it goes with religious cults. Everything boils down to which side of the hive wall on which you fall. I’ve yet to hear a liberal friend explain why they are are for changing the definition of marriage. They just are and if you’re not then you’re a bad person with a head full of crimethink.

The IQ side of the coin is not so obvious, mostly because we have conflated morality and intelligence in modern times. The fake nerd culture has made intelligence a mark of moral goodness. Bad people breath through their mouth while watching UFC. Good people talk about the latest Malcolm Gladwell book they did not read, while watching Cosmos on Netflix. Despite that, there is a moral component and like abortion is has to do with the downstream consequences. That’s hard and bumps into icky subjects so it is not permitted in public. Instead we get tantrums and the spewing of buzzwords like in this ridiculous Atlantic story.

Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a collection of marriage-equality decisions and deferred for another term what seems now an inevitable ruling for marriage equality. The very next day, the Ninth Circuit handed down an opinion, Latta v. Otter, striking down a number of same-sex-marriage bans.

In doing so, the appeals court provided the first of what will surely be many such decisions from which the Court can choose when the justices consider what cases they might hear in the future—and so offers potential rationales by which they might make marriage equality the law of the land. The Ninth Circuit’s majority opinion rejects same-sex-marriage bans because they violate the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating based on sexual orientation, which is a standard reason courts have struck down these bans.

But there is a twist: According to one judge, this is about sexism, too. In her concurrence, Judge Marsha Berzon argues that same-sex-marriage bans also constitute sex discrimination and therefore violate Equal Protection on additional grounds.

In some respects, Berzon’s concurrence was nothing new. Since the beginning of the fight for marriage equality, advocates have argued that a failure to allow same-sex couples to wed amounts to sex discrimination. This argument has, with a couple of notable exceptions, failed in courts. The Hawaii Supreme Court used this logic in 1994 when it issued the first decision in the U.S. for marriage equality (later nullified by a state constitutional amendment), and the argument has only succeeded in a Utah federal district court since then.

The formalist argument is that such bans classify on the basis of sex in a very basic way: In states where a man cannot marry a man, he is deprived of this right by virtue of his sex. That is, were the man a woman, he would have the right to marry his mate.

Let’s take the highlighted portions in order. The phrase “marriage-equality” is a marketing term intended to shift the focus away from the lack of an affirmative argument in favor of homosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual marriage is irrational, as a matter of former logic, is the reason. Similarly, same-sex-marriage bans are nonsensical since you cannot ban something that cannot and does not exist. It is akin to claiming there is a unicorn ban.

The third highlighted portion is why untethering yourself from objective reality leads to trouble. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. These are biological facts as axiomatic as gravity. Implying that people who act in ways contrary to the biology have created a third sex category should be grounds for commitment in the local asylum. The reason the state cannot issue a marriage license to two males is the same reason they don’t issue driver’s licenses to leprechauns.

The final bit it emblematic of most self-described advocates. They never bother to learn why things are as they are and they never learn the opposing arguments. The mind of the fanatic knows only that which supports the object of his fanaticism. Those who oppose these changes to the legal definition of marriage do so in defense of an institution that has served Western people well since the Franks first imposed it in the fifth century. Turning it into a roommate agreement, something that already exists, is nothing but a veiled attempt to destroy another pillar of civilization.

I’m tempted to say that these fanatics rally to homosexual marriage because they get caught up in the emotion of joining a mass movement. But, that’s just not the case. The two lesbians who wrote that Atlantic piece are incapable of reasoning through any of this, which is why they latch onto buzzwords and jargon. It let’s someone else do their thinking.