What does catching a football behind one's head have to do with morality?

On Wednesday, a national group advocating against gay marriage released a video featuring former New York Giant wide receiver David Tyree (you may remember him) arguing against the current legislation before the New York State Assembly that would legalize matrimonial unions between gay couples. In the video, Tyree reportedly opposes gay marriage on both spiritual and secular grounds, arguing that such a practice is an affront to God and that gay couples cannot "teach something that [they] don't have," insinuating that children of gay married couples will suffer a life in which their gender identity is forever confused.

Let's leave the rhetoric for a second here, because quite honestly, these are statements we've heard a thousand times before (apparently, if you give the gay community a cookie, the depraved scoundrels in our country will want a glass of milk). The more important issue raised by Tyree's recorded statement has to do with the way both sides of the debate have allowed the controversy to play out before the American people. These are two sides talking at--rather than with--each other, to the detriment of the gay community's purpose. Gay marriage has become, in this country, nothing more than a P.R. battle between two sides who believe themselves to be morally justified. The gay community carries the burden of illustrating why marriage between their members should be morally justified, based on the history of the argument in the United States and its conservative form of Christianity that has dominated the vote well through the 20th Century (and, some would argue, the 21st, with George W. Bush's large evangelical voting bloc). Instead, movements like the NOH8 campaign, among others, have turned the issue into a "whose celebrities are better" competition with their opponents, rather than substantive debate. This allows the opposition to, in turn, respond in a superficial manner, so that the story here becomes what rhetoric a Super Bowl hero is using in a video, rather than the implications of the legislation before the New York State Assembly.

Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Malcolm X weren't national celebrities before they spoke out against racial injustice. If the gay community wants to work toward public awareness and support for what I believe to be a moral cause, they need to attack their opposition in a moral and substantive way, rather than get Whoopi Goldberg to shake a finger at the camera. The time is ripe for such a movement, too, as the media blazes with tales of members of the straight community co-opting the persona of the gay community superficially for personal gain. Strong central leadership should take action to illustrate that the moral positions of the gay community cannot so easily be counterfeited, and that the current legislation would extend moral rights to homosexuals that have been unjustly denied them for so long. Another Ellen Degeneres PSA alone isn't going to do that.