In the Sunday Independent of last Sunday week, Eamon Delaney, the former editor of Magill, wrote a column in which he argued that the gay rights agenda is overreaching by seeking, for example, a right to marry, to adopt children, and to intimidate opponents into silence.

Admittedly he left himself open to accusations of stereotyping the gay lifestyle, but this aside the reaction to his article amply proved his last point in particular. Delaney’s column went viral on the internet, recording a stratospheric 13,000 electronic shares, a truly astounding number.

To judge from Twitter, most of the people who shared his column were outraged and Delaney duly found himself denounced as a ‘bigot’ and a ‘homophobe’. This is the fate which faces anyone who opposes a scintilla of the gay rights agenda.

It is not enough to merely declare such a person to be wrong, their hatefulness is simply assumed.  If this isn’t moral intimidation, nothing is.

Last weekend’s Sunday Independent carried several responses to Delaney, the main one being Alan Flanagan’s of LGBT Noise.

Gay rights activists insist that what they want is entirely reasonable, namely an equal right with heterosexual couples to marry and to have children.

But in order to assert this right, they have to be able to show that there is no relevant difference between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples that warrants treating them differently with regard to marriage and adoption.

After all, it is no violation of the principle of equal treatment to treat different situations differently, as France’s supreme court recently confirmed when ruling that the current French law restricting marriage to one man and one woman is constitutional.

For this reason, gay marriage advocates have to insist that there are no real differences between men and women or mothers and fathers that make any real difference to children.

Therefore, they attach no special value to motherhood and fatherhood. Just so long as children have loving parents (how many exactly?), the sex (or should I say ‘gender’?) of the parents doesn’t matter a jot.

A loving lesbian couple is no different from a child’s point of view than a loving mother and father, goes the gay marriage argument.

But of course, this is a very big and very radical leap to make. It is a leap which so far is backed only by a relatively small number of studies of small numbers of children raised by lesbian couples.

But if there is a difference, if there is a special value to being raised by your own biological parents, or failing that, by another couple willing to act as a child’s mother and father, then it makes perfect sense to give special status to the marriage of a man and a woman, for the sake of children.

Now, we can disagree on this point. We can argue over the evidence. But it still a very big thing to set aside as somehow irrelevant and of no special consideration the giant fact that no child can exist without a biological mother and father, even if the two be an egg donor and a sperm donor.

And it is simply unacceptable to denounce as bigots those who believe a special value ought to be attached to motherhood and fatherhood, which is the fate that befell Eamon Delaney, as it previously befell the likes of Brenda Power or Lucinda Creighton.

As mentioned, the demand for gay marriage presents itself as something that is eminently moderate. But it is no way moderate to simply deny the value to children of being raised by a mother and a father, preferably their own, and then to condemn as ‘homophobes’ any and all who disagree.  On the contrary, to do so is immoderate, unreasonable and about as audacious as anything can be.