Crack cocaine vs African Americans is rather more indirect though.

Being anti-gay marriage directly means "I want gay people to not have the following rights: x, y and z," and in that sense it is directly anti-gay.

It's not as severe as criminalizing being gay or even putting the death penalty on it, but it is definitely anti-gay.

P.S. I never meant to imply you were against gay marriage; was just pointing you to the most convincing argument.

Yikes, people obviously feel strongly about this as they are downvoting comments clearly made in good faith.

> Being anti-gay marriage directly means "I want gay people to not have the following rights: x, y and z," and in that sense it is directly anti-gay.

It is more direct, but not absolutely direct. People get religious over the word "marriage", which shouldn't be surprising because in a lot of ways it's primarily a religious concept. A lot of them actually don't mind if gay people have rights x, y, and z. But by framing the whole conversation around "marriage", it bypasses the question of rights for a lot of people. It jumps right to challenging their long-held, internalized view of what the word "marriage" means.

And that might be an important thing to challenge! But for a lot of people it's a separate issue from the rights question.

I agree that marriage and 'rights conferred by marriage' could have been split.

That's actually how gay marriage was introduced in the Netherlands, through something called a 'cohabitation-agreement.'