Francis Maude:

• "It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It's like disapproving of rain."

Ed Fallon:

• "What are you trying to protect heterosexual marriage from? There isn't a limited amount of love in Iowa. It isn't a non-renewable resource. If Amy and Barbara or Mike and Steve love each other, it doesn't mean that John and Mary can't."

Ernest Gaines:

• "Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?"

Jasmine Guy:

• "I don't much care who is gay or straight or married or not. I mostly notice if they are brave enough to confront bigotry."

John Shelby Spong:

• "...secular journalists ... tend to accept uncritically the oft-repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti-gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro-slavery and anti-women."
• "We don't choose to be white or black, male or female, left-handed or right-handed, gay or straight. We awaken in each instance to the reality of what we are. Nothing external to our humanity activates our self-understanding. It simply is. Alcohol distorts life for the alcoholic. Homosexuality does not distort the life of the gay person. Your pastor's understanding is simply one more version of the idea that homosexuality is a sickness or addiction that needs to be cured if possible and if not possible, it needs to be suppressed. Wholeness never came to anyone who tried to suppress his or her deepest identity."

Judith Light:

• "You know, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender - people are people."

Marlo Thomas:

• “I don't think homosexuality is a choice. Society forces you to think it's a choice, but in fact, it's in one's nature. The choice is whether one expresses one's nature truthfully or spends the rest of one's life lying about it.”

Harry A. Blackmum:

• “Disapproval of homosexuality cannot justify invading the houses, hearts and minds of citizens who choose to live their lives differently.”

Lea DeLaria:

• “What do you mean, you "Don't believe in homosexuality"? It's not like the Easter Bunny, your belief isn't necessary.”
• “They are preserving the sanctity of marriage, so that two gay men who've been together for twenty-five years can't get married, but a guy can still get drunk in Vegas and marry a hooker at the Elvis chapel! The sanctity of marriage is saved!”

Ted Olson:

• "Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?"

James Baldwin:

• "Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."

Paul Sorvino:

• "Ultimately, love conquers all, and gay or straight, don't we all want to believe that? I would that if this was to happen to me, and one of my kids had come and told me he or she was gay, I would say: If that's the only way you can live, then I love you."

Johann von Goethe:

• "If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise."

Paul Newman:

• "I'm a supporter of gay rights. And not a closet supporter either. From the time I was a kid, I have never been able to understand attacks upon the gay community. There are so many qualities that make up a human being... by the time I get through with all the things that I really admire about people, what they do with their private parts is probably so low on the list that it is irrelevant."

George Michael:

• "I've wondered what my sexuality might be, but I've never wondered whether it was acceptable or not. Anyway, who really cares whether I'm gay or straight?"

Rita Mae Brown:

• "No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody."

Unknown:

• "One should no more deplore homosexuality than left-handedness."
• "Soldiers who are not afraid of guns, bombs, capture, torture or death say they are afraid of homosexuals. Clearly we should not be used as soldiers; we should be used as weapons."
• "I guess I just don't understand how people can be so passionately hateful about something that won't affect their lives one bit."

Bruce Bawer:

• "Straight Americans need... an education of the heart and soul. They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul."

Gore Vidal:

• "The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself."

Rev. Troy Perry:

• "The Lord is my Shepherd and He knows I'm gay."

The Value of Families:

• "War. Rape. Murder. Poverty. Equal rights for gays. Guess which one the Southern Baptist Convention is protesting?"

Tennessee Williams:

• "What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains."

Leonard P. Matlovich:

• "When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."

Barry Goldwater:

• "You don't have to be straight to be in the military; you just have to be able to shoot straight."

Abigail Van Buren:

• In response to a "Dear Abby" reader who complained that a gay couple was moving in across the street and wanted to know what he could do to improve the quality of the neighbourhood - "You could move."

Elizabeth Taylor:

• "Why shouldn’t gay people be able to live as open and freely as everybody else? What it comes down to, ultimately, is love. How can anything bad come out of love? The bad stuff comes out of mistrust, misunderstanding and, God knows, from hate and from ignorance."

Dick Cheney:

• "Freedom means freedom for everyone. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish."

Katharine Hepburn:

• "You can't change the music of your soul."

Howard Dean:

• "Stand up for doing the right thing; for being a human being. Put human rights above politics — because if you don’t, you’ll regret it for the rest of your political career. Conservatives should note that the first American soldier to ‘take a bullet’ at the onset of the current war in Iraq was a gay man."

Julian Bond:

• "When someone asks me, “are gay rights civil rights?” my answer is always, “Of course, they are.” Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives: the right to equal treatment before the law. These are the rights shared by everyone. There is no one in the United States who does not, or should not, enjoy or share in enjoying these rights. Gay and lesbian rights are not special rights in any way. It isn’t “special” to be free from discrimination. It is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship."

The Dallas Principles:

• "What would you do? …if you were thrown out of your house as a kid? …if you were beaten up in school and your teachers did nothing? …if you were fired from your job? …if you were banned from serving in our military? …if a landlord refused to rent to you? …if a doctor refused to treat you? …if you could not marry the person you love? …if your kids were taken away from you? …if the government denied 1,100 benefits to you and your spouse, but not to other couples? …if the government deported your spouse? …if the hospital prevented you from saying good-bye as your partner lay dying alone? Welcome To Our Lives. We are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Americans."

Bayard Rustin:

• "The job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That’s our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment."

Deb Price:

• "An engineering professor is treating her husband, a loan officer, to dinner for finally giving in to her pleas to shave off the scraggly beard he grew on vacation. His favorite restaurant is a casual place where they both feel comfortable in slacks and cotton/polyester-blend golf shirts. But, as always, she wears the gold and pearl pendant he gave her the day her divorce decree was final. They're laughing over their menus because they know he always ends up diving into a giant plate of ribs but she won't be talked into anything more fattening than shrimp.Quiz: How many biblical prohibitions are they violating? Well, wives are supposed to be 'submissive' to their husbands (I Peter 3:1). And all women are forbidden to teach men (I Timothy 2:12), wear gold or pearls (I Timothy 2:9) or dress in clothing that 'pertains to a man' (Deuteronomy 22:5). Shellfish and pork are definitely out (Leviticus 11:7, 10) as are usury (Deuteronomy 23:19), shaving (Leviticus 19:27) and clothes of more than one fabric (Leviticus 19:19). And since the Bible rarely recognizes divorce, they're committing adultery, which carries the rather harsh penalty of death by stoning (Deuteronomy 22:22). So why are they having such a good time? Probably because they wouldn't think of worrying about rules that seem absurd, anachronistic or - at best - unrealistic. Yet this same modern-day couple could easily be among the millions of Americans who never hesitate to lean on the Bible to justify their own anti-gay attitudes."