THEY'LL KNOW WE ARE CHRISTIANS BY OUR LOVE. I see The Anchoress has caught up with the New York Marriage Equality Act. We can sense her state of mind in a post at her own site, in which she practices what seems to be a little displacement upon Maureen Dowd, who wrote a puff piece on gay marriage hero Andrew Cuomo:

Oh, you dishonest, hate-obsessed, sniping harpy, you know damn well that if Bush 43 had talked to his father every day, you’d have crucified him for it with a gem on the order of: “The boy-pwince needs to tawk to Poppy evewy day, or he can’t find the Owal Owwice!”

Yeesh, some anchoress.

Her more substantive argument against the Act comes at First Things, where The Anchoress tells us about a nun who wanted to gender-neutralize prayers. This becomes The Anchoress' point of comparison with The Gays:

And since nothing is free, their “equality” came at a price: Sister’s obsessive focus on gender-language eventually closed her off to other voices and other words, until she became her very own cloister, leaving the very lively parish community for a safe-but-sterile environment where she is not challenged to relate to God in any way other than what she has permanently settled-on and declared for herself.

It is similar for the gay community now, too. Clutching a hard-won, if illusory, prize of worldly “equality,” and being “like everyone else,” they perhaps do not yet realize what they are rejecting—the challenge and adventure that leads to the pearl of great price: the call to be “other” than your own declaration.

These gays don't appreciate what a gift their second-class citizenship had been! Those earthly powers who spoke for God denied them marriage not out of bigotry, but so their isolation and heartbreak would bring them closer to God.

The adventure begins when you hear the call, and respond not with a “give me,” but with a “please take.”

It sounds like something torturers might say mockingly to their victims. In this case the victims have escaped, but they're not out of the woods yet.