Gays Defend Marriage

David Benkof is blogging under the name Gays Defend Marriage David describes himself this way:

David Benkof is openly bisexual, but as an Orthodox Jew he is guided by Jewish law in the areas of sexuality and family life.
A few interesting facts about David:

• He has a master’s in Jewish history from Stanford and is getting a Ph.D. in the subject at NYU.

And he describes his mission this way:

Welcome to GaysDefendMarriage.com, a new voice in the “marriage equality” debate. For years, there has been an apparent consensus in the LGBT community that:

The man-woman definition of marriage is unacceptable and must be replaced by any means necessary with a new approach that allows us to marry our same-sex partners; and
Redefining marriage is overwhelmingly the most important issue facing lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.
Well, I don’t agree. I think insisting on redefining marriage will not help LGBT people very much (other than boosting our self-esteem) and could do real harm to innocents like straight couples, children, and traditionally religious people. I also think issues like the HIV/AIDS epidemic among African-American men who have sex with men, Florida’s bigoted refusal to let gays and lesbians adopt children, the FDA’s abhorrent gay blood ban, the dreadful disease syphilis (which is contracted most often through gay sex), the pointless ban on visitors and immigrants with HIV, and widespread prison rape (whose frequent victims are gay and bisexual men and transgender women) are far more important issues than “marriage equality” - even if you think the benefits of marriage equality outweigh the harms. After all, nobody ever suffered from a horrible death because the government called her relationship a “civil union” instead of a marriage. The LGBT community needs to get its priorities straight.

I discovered David over at Marriage Debate, where I sometimes post. Thank you David, for going against the tide within the gay community. I David's view of himself that gayness is not his one and only defining characteristic. In fact, I have been troubled by the view that sexual orientation is an essential characteristic of a person, while sex itself is relegated to a merely incidental trait. In my view, the exact opposite is the case: gender is essential and sexual orientation is a trait.