The presiding judge in the current California case deciding the constitutionality of gay marriage is refusing to let the city counter the ludicrous fringe arguments that children need opposite sex partners and that you can change your sexual orientation. How in the hell is this possible? (SF Gate):

The city fears that the presence of those declarations, without opposing evidence, might be used by an appellate court to justify the state’s definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, a city lawyer said Monday.

“We don’t want that hateful stuff to go into the record without being responded to,” said Deputy City Attorney Kathleen Morris, citing a declaration by a psychiatrist who described homosexuality as a mental disorder. Morris said the city still hopes to get its own declarations into the record reviewed by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer and the courts that review his ruling.

Last week, Kramer refused to remove the declarations by opponents of same-sex marriage from the case file or to let the city present contrary authorities. He said he intends to base his ruling on legal arguments, not factual disputes — a signal that the judge may not think the statements already submitted contain anything that needs to be refuted.

[Look at the discredited crap that has already been submitted to the judge — Pam]

The Prop. 22 organization and another group, the Campaign for California Families, argue that the law is justified because husbands and wives make better parents than same-sex couples. Among the declarations they submitted to Kramer were statements from:

Satinover, author of “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth”

— Jeffrey Satinover, a Princeton University lecturer and psychiatrist who specializes in “reparative therapy” for gays, saying the American Psychiatric Association was misled into removing homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973.

— Alan Chambers and Randy Thomas, leaders of a group called Exodus International, describing their “successful transformation from homosexuality to heterosexuality.”

— Katherine Young, professor of religion at McGill University in Montreal, saying that “children need a parent of each sex” because of inherent differences between men and women.

— George Rekers, a psychologist and professor at the University of South Carolina, saying studies show children do better with heterosexual than with homosexual parents.

Morris, one of the city’s lawyers, said the declarations were largely based on stereotypes and “contradicted by science.”