Watch for works from this author.

This is an excellent (but very long) article that is very revealing about why "the desert religions" fear gay marriage. The guy being interviewed is Richard Rodriguez, who is a practicing gay Catholic. His previous three books (one a 1993 Pulitzer finalist) were groundbreaking.

This interview touches on his 4th book, which is about monotheism. It is in this book that he talks about the three "desert religions"; Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Quoting from the Salon article, "In one of his Peabody Award-winning radio commentaries for PBS's News Hour, [Rodriguez said] he has been trying to understand the strands of darkness that run through these religions."

I've cut and pasted the relevant part to me here, and the link to the full article is at the bottom.

[an excerpt]
Salon:
Speaking of hypocrisy, churches have plenty of sexual skeletons in their closet.

Rodriguez:
Right. The Mormon Church has this incredible notoriety in America for polygamy and has been persecuted because of it. The very church that became notorious because of polygamy is now insisting that marriage is one man and one woman. That is, at least, an irony of history. But as a number of Mormon women friends of mine say, the same church that espouses the centrality of family in their lives is also the church that urges them to reject their gay children.

Then there is the Roman Catholic Church, my own church, which has just come off this extraordinary season of sexual scandal and misbehavior in the rectory against children. The church is barely out of the court and it's trying to assume the role of governor of sexual behavior, having just proved to America its inability to govern its own sexual behavior.

Look at the evangelicals. In their insistence that people be born again, they know Americans are broken. In their circus-tent suburban churches, you find 10,000 people on a Sunday morning. You find people who have been divorced, people who have had drug experiences, people who have been in jail. These churches touch upon a dream that people can put our lives back together again.

Now these churches are going after homosexuals as a way of insisting on their own propriety. They are insisting that they have a role to play in the general society as moral guardians, when what we have seen in the recent past is just the opposite. I mean, it's one thing for the churches to insist on their right to define the sacrament of marriage for their own members. But it's quite another for them to insist that they have a right to define the relationships of people outside their communities. That's really what's most troubling about Proposition 8. It was a deliberate civic intrusion by the churches.
[end of excerpt]

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/11/25/proposition_8_religion/