I’ve been a libertarian my entire adult life. Libertarianism, as I’ve been an apologist for it, is a philosophy promoting individual rights, civil liberties, and the freedom to have manifest destiny over one’s own life and property. I am opposed to the government telling people what they can do with their minds and bodies. I am consistent on this whether the issue is consensual intimate relations between adults, or the freedom to self-medicate and self-entertain oneself using the agricultural or pharmaceutical product of one’s choice, or the responsibility of parents to choose what their children are taught about how the human race came to be, or whether it’s regarding the decision of a woman not to carry a fetus to term in her womb.

So when I have to explain to my daughter, who phone-banked in the November 2008 election against California’s Proposition 8 by which the California electorate voted to amend their Constitution restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, why I’m opposed to California courts overturning the vote she lost, it requires an explanation of my grounding principles and my firmly grasping sharp ideological nettles.

Let there be no mistake. I favor absolute equality in law for adult individuals who prize the liberty to have intimate relations with, fall in love with, and make life commitments to other individuals of their own gender. I favor laws enabling institutions to grant equity to same-sex couples in matters of habitation, inheritance, taxation, hospital visitation and fiduciary decision-making. If there are to be civil rights laws forbidding discrimination in employment, housing, and use of common facilities, and laws forbidding hate crimes, on the basis of race, color, religion, or ethnic origin, then I see no reason why gender preference is worth neither less nor more than these other collective categories for receiving grants of legal protection.

But none of that means I’m going to favor up-ending constitutional principles to favor a specific group’s pleadings, nor do I think a struggle for civil rights entitles one to thuggery, nor am I willing to embrace hypocrisy, the destruction of language, rewriting history, and lies just because some people have justifiable grievances.

Let’s start with the lies contained in the use of two common terms: “homosexual” and “gay.”

There is no such thing as “homo” sexuality, unless by that term you are referring to sexual relations between two members of the species homo sapiens.

Sexuality refers to the natural biological processes by which living organisms reproduce. In mammals, primates, and homo sapiens, this natural process requires gametes supplied by both males and females. Gametes supplied by two males will not cause reproduction. Gametes supplied by two females will not cause reproduction. Only gametes supplied by the copulation of males and females will cause reproduction — and you can teach whatever propaganda you like in taxpayer-funded and politically decided ’sex education’ curricula and no children will result from the attempts of the students to copulate otherwise.

This is not to say that everything that heterosexuals do with each other is sex, either. It isn’t. The term “oral” sex is also a misnomer, as I’m sure former President William Jefferson Clinton would be happy to inform you. Neither is “anal” sex a biologically correct term. Despite parental or church propaganda, sticking a penis in either a mouth or an anus cannot lead to pregnancy. If Juno had given her boyfriend a blowjob there would have been an entirely different movie.

Non-progenitive behavior is sex play, power play, love play, or molestation, depending on the intents and consent of the participants. But inasmuch as no reproduction can result, these are not sex acts and those engaging in them are not defined by their acts as “sexuals,” homo, hetero, or else wise.

In my 1983 novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, I invented a neologism to describe men who were physically attracted only to other men. I called them “andromen” using the Greek root for male. I’ll continue using my own term for the remainder of this screed. The term “lesbian” needs no redefinition and I’ll continue using it as well.

From the standpoint of reproductive biology, andromen and lesbians are chaste. They may cohabitate, and love each other. They may pair-bond into brotherhoods, sisterhoods, or families. But unless they find a partner of the opposite sex to mix their gametes with, they are not sexually active. Any condoms they use are solely for the purpose of preventing the spread of diseases, which not only are sexually transmitted but also non-sexually transmitted through intimate encounters that exchange bodily fluids. But these condoms are irrelevant to preventing a pregnancy, which can not result from these intimacies.

So let’s put another lie to bed. AIDS is not only a Sexually Transmitted Disease; it is also a Non-Sexually-Transmitted Disease. I would dare say that it would be hard to find a case where the HIV virus was ever transmitted through a sexual encounter in a San Francisco “gay” bath house — unless one of the participants was a female pretending to be a male and the male partner was somehow manipulated into inserting his penis into her vagina and ejaculating therein.

Since males who are attracted only to other males are sexually abstinent, they are perfect candidates for the Roman Catholic priesthood, which requires their priests to be celibate — that is, to refrain from marriage. Likewise, lesbians — being sexually abstinent — are perfect candidates to be nuns, since their “marriage” to Christ need never be physically consummated. For some reason I’ve never been able to fathom, neither the Roman Catholic hierarchy nor the activist movements for andromen and lesbians are comfortable with this obvious lifestyle perfection.

And, in my opinion, the unwillingness of “gay” organizations to stand up for Catholic priests when they are caught engaging in non-sexual acts with other makes is the sheerest hypocrisy and poltroonery.

While we’re at it, let’s dispose of the label “gay.” It’s false-to-fact propaganda. Being physically attracted only to members of one’s own sex does not make one happier than being physically attracted to members of the opposite sex. If anything, the social stigma has tended to cause a great deal of unhappiness. Being expressively flamboyant, liking Broadway show tunes, being artistically creative, and liking gourmet cooking may indeed make one gay. By those definitions I am gay. But I’m not willing to stick my penis into another man’s anus or mouth, or have another man stick his penis into mine, to complete my initiation.

I understand that scriptures deriving from the Hebrews — Jewish, Christian, and Islamic — have been interpreted as being harsh toward same-sex couplings. I’ve read the Bible and I understand why ancient nomadic tribes, being low population and economically marginal, placed a high utility on reproductive behavior — and why their cultures reflected an understandable hostility towards gangs of thugs sneaking into their camps and molesting their men. I just don’t think God’s instructions to these ancients was specifically applicable to men who set up housekeeping in West Hollywood or the Castro.

But it’s offensive to me when a church service is invaded by something that looks like the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s offensive to me when an old lady holding a cross at an anti-Proposition 8 protest has the cross ripped from her hands and stomped on. I understand the long-standing provocations but this grudge match between Queers and Bible Thumpers has got to stop.

What also has to stop is the attempt by andromen and lesbians to norm social acceptance of their lifestyle preferences by pretending that marriage is a civil right they are being denied. Marriage has always required consummation and this they cannot do with each other.

Nor is it right that in their hunger for social acceptance they are willing to corrupt the judicial system such that a state’s attorney general and state judges sworn to uphold a state’s constitution — and deriving whatever legitimate authority they have from that constitution — are demanded to ignore a polity’s majority vote to enshrine a millennial-old custom in their state’s constitution, and stage a political coup to overturn it.

My darling daughter.

You want to disestablish marriage as a legally regulated institution entirely? As a libertarian, I’m with you.

You want to amend the California constitution so that any two or more adults who want to get married — including groups of men and women in any number and mixture — may legally do so … I’ll cross the border from my home state of Nevada to help you campaign for it.

But don’t tell me that “gays” have a greater right to marriage than Mormon-offshoot polygamists. That sort of special pleading that ignores the historical discrimination against others just revolts me.

If you want your daddy to line up with you to defend someone’s civil rights, then they’re going to have to respect the civil rights of everyone else and not expect more political privileges than any other homo sapiens — whether we homos arrived on this planet through the good graces of God or Charles Darwin.

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J. Neil Schulman is a libertarian writer, activist, and filmmaker.