“They actually used the word ‘hijack’ – just a month after 9-11.”

You can hear the contempt in Sean Cahill’s voice as he quotes the “Christian” front group Concerned Women of America’s claim that the roughly 20 gay and lesbian surviving partners of 9-11 victims were trying to “hijack the moral capital of marriage and apply it to their own relationships.” The reason? These men and women who’d lost their partners 30 days earlier in the worst terrorist attack in American history had the audacity to apply for spousal compensation from the taxpayer-funded September 11 Victims Compensation Fund.

If you ever thought, even for a moment, that the Republican Party’s decades-long effort to demonize gays and lesbians was born of sincere religious conviction; Sean Cahill’s new book Same-Sex Marriage in the United States: Focus on the Facts will quickly disabuse you of the notion. Painstakingly, powerfully and with a passion not implied by the title, the director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Policy Institute makes the Constitutional case for same-sex marriage. In the process, he paints a devastating picture of the Christian political operations that do the dirty work for the Administration and the Republican National Committee.

“A lot of these organizations use gay bashing as a cash cow,” he told the Gay & Lesbian Times in a recent interview. “Gay bashing motivates people to part with their money in a way that abortion doesn’t anymore.”

If Cahill’s analysis is correct, what he calls the “anti-gay movement” has every reason to be terrified. Barring a federal Constitutional amendment, “same-sex marriage” is an all-but-inevitable outcome of a kind of legal perfect storm: The 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down that state’s sodomy law, and the Massachusetts’ Supreme Court’s, five months later, ruling that denying marriage to same-sex couples violates the Commonwealth’s constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process.

In vivid detail Cahill chronicles the incalculable damage to Christianity that will flow from this development. Same-sex partners would be entitled to (gasp) Social Security survivor benefits! They would be able to file joint income tax returns with the IRS. Their foreign partners would be able to enter the United States legally and eventually obtain citizenship. Mary Mother of God, they would even be able to renew the copyrighted work of their deceased partners! What we’re talking about here folks is nothing less than the end of life-on-earth-as-we-know-it.

Cahill cites this example of the calamities from which the moral nannies of the Christian right seek to protect us: Thorsten Behrens, 33, and Christopher Schiebel, 32, have been in a committed relationship for five years. Behrens has no children, but Schiebel has two from a previous marriage whom both men are raising. Behrens is the main breadwinner. In 2002 he earned $44,198 more than four times his partner’s income. Based on their current earnings, Behrens will receive $1,527 per month in Social Security benefits when he retires and Schiebel will receive $303. However, if they could marry and their marriage were recognized by the Social Security Administration, Schiebel would be legally eligible for the spousal benefit, which would guarantee him half of Thorsten’s monthly payment – or $461 more every month. We’re talking real money here: Cahill points out that nearly two-thirds of retirees depend on Social Security for more than half their income.

In 112 pages Sean Cahill delivers on his promise: He actually does focus on the facts. Noting that this debate is about equal access to things like pension benefits and healthcare, not forcing the Southern Baptist Convention to marry us, Cahill explains the stakes in a way that readers may have never fully calculated or appreciated before. In doing so, he highlights an interesting dilemma for the party in power. The Republican National Committee and the various Christian front groups who implement its agenda believe they kept George Bush in the White House with promises to amend the Constitution to ban the supposed horrors of same-sex marriage.

Time to put up or shut up, guys. As Cahill convincingly demonstrates, if you don’t get two-thirds of the members of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures to pass a federal Constitutional amendment real fast, same-sex couples may soon start to receive the same health insurance and pension benefits as every other American family. Sweet Jesus!