Three college guys wearing suits were passing out brochures from Protect Marriage Washington, the group attempting to repeal the domestic-partnership law, before Dan and I gave a talk last week about approving Referendum 71 at Whitworth University. "If homosexual marriage becomes legal"—even though homosexual marriage isn't on the ballot—"the next step is to force public schools to teach children that homosexual unions are normal, require churches to perform homosexual ceremonies, and take away your right to speak against it..." the brochure says.

Are they bigots? Au contraire.

Our opposition is not about hate. It's about love. It's about loving our children enough to consider fully the long-term effects of such major social-engineering on their future. It's about keeping the teaching of morals at home and not codifying into law what a majority believe to be immoral behavior. No nation in history that has ever openly embraced homosexuality to this degree has ever survived.

Rejecting SB-5688 preserves the most fundamental of human institution—the marriage of one man and one woman.

The survival of nations aside—really, now we're condemning contemporary policy because it was present in an ancient civilization? Down with aqueducts! Down with roads!—the measure has nothing to do with defining "marriage" between "one man and one woman." The official ballot summary, as written by conservative Republican Rob McKenna, says, "Registered domestic partnerships are not marriages, and marriage is prohibited except between one man and one woman."

And what's up with Ozzie and Harriett on the brochure? It says their kids, "David and Ricky Nelson really had it pretty good. They had a normal mother and father and grandparents. Society needs, and tomorrow's children deserve, the healthy nurturing provided by traditional families." Traditional marriage helped out David Nelson so much that he married twice and Ricky Nelson had a famously tumultuous marriage, followed by an acrimonious divorce, after which his wife took their four children.

For what it's worth, my traditional family—mother, father, grandparents, three meals around the table—produced one hippie and two fruits.