The tone of my reply was unnecessarily aggressive, and I apologise for that.

> Quite a lot of personal attacks there...

Maybe less than you think - I'll attempt to enumerate and expand upon them in a less emotionally-charged way:

- "Perhaps you like being able to say you're married and have everyone know you're not gay?"

I still don't see where you've explained why you actually "oppose the redefinition of the word "marriage"", so was attempting to find the real reason, however this was not a constructive comment.

- "that would be outright homophobia and you're still apparently labouring under the misapprehension that you don't suffer from that"

Homophobia can simply take the form of an unconcious bias just as it can refer to physical violence for example - there's a spectrum. You demonstrate this bias in many places, as I have attempted to explain. It's very 'meta', though, so I appreciate that you may not see what I'm talking about - the apparatus you could use to understand it is also the apparatus that's exhibiting the bias which would tend to limit your visibility of it.

- "Perhaps you're actually a closet homosexual and trying hard to deflect people away from finding out?"

I'm aware this has touched a nerve with some people but if anyone thinks it is intended as a personal attack then they are actually suffering from exactly the unconcious bias I was referring to. I was aware that I was using strong language in an effort to make my point, but it also occurred to me that perhaps you suffer from these issues more than you let on and are attempting to displace attention away from them. In that case, I was trying to take the sting out of my words.

Seriously though, anyone taking offence at this - strenuously defending gay rights and then using 'maybe you're gay' as some sort of insult? That would be bizarrely hypocritical of me. Just for the record - I don't feel that suggesting someone is gay is offensive; if you do, think about what that means.

- "the fact that you trivialise the issue thus suggests that you really don't understand the issues at stake"

I stand by this - 'walk a mile in their shoes' before you brush these things aside so lightly.

- "On the other hand if you want to keep tabs on who's gay and who's not - you're homophobic"

As above - the desire to make that distinction stems from unconscious bias; after all, what difference does it make really? Any more than who likes the Beatles, who lives in London, etc.?

- "You may insist you're not but that stubborn refusal to introspect or question yourself doesn't change the fact."

It's not clear from the way I wrote it but this is conditional upon "if you want to keep tabs" etc. I'm not saying you ARE stubborn, but that you would be if the former comment were also true.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

> We're all minorities, depending on how you cut the population. The question is whether you let it define you negatively and become a 'victim', or just get on with being happy. People who get offended by words are wasting their energy on silly things that don't matter, and often actually making racism/sexism/etc worse by drawing attention to things that aren't actually there in the first place. Judge people by their actions. Not by words.

Yes we are all minorities in our way, but some minorities suffer more for it than others. It's easy to sit on the other side of that fence and say 'just get on with being happy' but when you're subject to violence and abuse from other people because of some minor fact of your being that harms no-one, it's a lot harder to actually do it. Comments like that thoughtlessly trivialise other peoples' problems.

> If I was gay, I certainly wouldn't care, as long as I was free to love who I like.

This, for me, is the key point - if you are actually gay, then I can't argue with you. However if you're not (as your choice of phrasing suggests), then you have no way of knowing what you would think if you were - your life would've been markedly different in certain (many?) ways and you have no frame of reference for knowing what that is actually like. It's like telling a person with clinical depression that 'if I suffered from that, I'd just cheer up and try to focus on the good things in life' - an 'armchair critic' type of comment which betrays no understanding of the reality of the situation.

> I'm done here...

In closing, then, maybe you can take this as an opportunity to rethink your position on some issues - I'm not getting that from your comments but hope springs eternal.