The Boaz article is a distraction from real issues.

Neither of these now-derided laws is a perfect match with the predicament facing gays in Virginia, but both flowed from an arrogant desire by the state to control private relationships.

Boaz fails to distinguish between the private relationship and the public marriage. Marriage is not a contract between two people.** It is a contract between two people, the state, and society. The members of the couple pledge fideliy to each other. The state grants certain legal standings, including authority over any children that come into the marriage (assuming the state doesn't adopt the fascist education system of Plato's Republic). Through the hazy mechanism of culture rather than oath, society pledges to accept the legal standing of the couple (not necessarily accepting the wisdom of the union), and to respect the couple's vow of fidelity.

(**Note: polygamy is excluded from the equation for these purposes.)

Laws against marrying the "feeble-minded" are a modern approach to the not-so-modern cause of eugenics; its root issue is whether elites should engineer the physiological fitness of the human race. Some object to racial intermarriage from a eugenics perspective, but in most cases it has more in common with the objections to intermarriage between people of different religions (or nationalities): the protectionist desire to preserve the cultural (or political) composition of one's society.

Neither hits on the central objection to same-sex marriage: the very definition of sexuality and gender. Government license and recognition of such unions officializes the unproven claim that homosexuality is an innocuous trait. As I once said on my blog, we're expected to believe that homosexuality is psychologically normal without being told why. We're expected to blindly trust a 1973 American Psychiatric Association ruling (which many of its members and 80+ years of research contested) without question, the way that medieval scientists and clerics demanded that Galileo accept Ptolemy without question.

One of my sayings about the homosexuality debate is that there is no homosexuality debate. Honest debate involves an open exchange and open fisking of each other's evidence. The creation/evolution debate has that; its participants challenge address each other's basic assumptions all the time. I've Googled my little booty off, and while I can find scientific arguments from the politically incorrect side, I can't find a single (supportive) explanation for the APA ruling, or an itemized refutation of those 80+ years of published studies. Why should I believe the side of a one-sided debate that ain't debating?

You can find hard scientific evidence that gay people have a psychiatric diesase? Link, please.

To be nitpicky, psychologists don't use the term "disease." Don't remember the details, but I remember reading about how the way disease works is vastly different from the way psychological disorders develop.

Sadly, there's still a lot you can't find on the Internet. I don't think there is any field of scientific study that has all related research collected in a single website. (Evolution/creation sites certainly aren't that thorough.) NARTH has a plethora of related articles for those with a lot of time on their hands to sift through the haystack in search of needles. One could always write NARTH (mailing address appears on green sidebar) and ask where to look for evidence contradicting the 1973 ruling.

So where is the evidence supporting the ruling? My chief complaint is that the PC side of the debate acts as if the main bones of contention have already been settled and it has no obligation to offer any proof. "Don't ask questions, just believe" ain't good enough.

Well, while I understand your desire for something saying "hey! we made this decision because of this evidence over here!" - the burden of proof should rightly fall on those wanting to change the status quo - I still personally fail to see how the claim that gay people are normal is not self-evident.

I know that's not an argument, or a study, or anything else, but that's what I have to offer.

It's just amazing to me when I see people who insist on discrimination because they worry that without it, the rationale for discrimination might disappear. Perhaps gay people are intrinsically inferior--but how are we to test this fact, if the external discrimination is never removed?