This is so the worst thing you're going to read all day.

[Content Note: Homophobia.]

Michael Kinsley: "LGBT PC: Being against marriage equality doesn't make you a monster." I believe this article once had another, equally amazing title, since its URL is "Ben Carson and Gay Marriage Police." Neat!

The article—a critical entry into the annals of journalism, which are otherwise devoid of pieces making the totally trenchant argument that privileged people who want to deny marginalized people the rights they enjoy aren't the MONSTERS that legions of straw-people accuse them of being—starts thus:

One reason the idea of gay marriage, or "marriage equality," spread so fast is that it seems obvious once you think about it. It was a genuinely new idea when it first appeared in this publication in 1989. As was not the case with civil rights for African Americans, feminism, or for that matter gay rights themselves, there was no long history of opposition to be overcome. The challenge was simply getting people to think about it a bit.

Perfect. That is just a perfect argument. There was no long history of denying same-sex couples the right to marry, because Michael Kinsey had never heard of same-sex marriage before it was shoved in front of his face in the course of his employment in the year 1989.

Lest you think I am being hyperbolic, this is also a direct quote from the piece:

The first known mention of gay marriage is an article ("Here Comes the Groom" by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989. And I would bet that there is no one born before 1989, gay or straight, who didn't, when he or she first heard the idea, go, whaaa?

I am not making that up. I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP!

Scott Lemieux notes "there were lawsuits claiming that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional that made it to state appellate courts in Minnesota, Kentucky, and Washington between 1971 and 1974," which swiftly dispatches both the incredible assertion no one had heard of same-sex marriage before 1989 and the extraordinary claim that there was not an established history of same-sex marriage related oppression. As if the lack of legal marriages between same-sex couples wasn't evidence enough of that oppression.

I guess Kinsley imagines that lesbians, gay men, and same-sex partnered bisexual people couldn't have been oppressed by the denial of marriage rights until the very moment that Andrew Sullivan introduced the concept of same-sex marriage to the entire world in 1989.

I don't even.