“There he sits, face scrunched, eyes clenched tight, fists balled up like he’s clinging to the last Valium on Earth, colon in tortured knots, soul shriveled into a tiny black speck of bile and nothingness, invoking God and sodomy and incest and quivering like he’s sitting on the red-hot poker of divine enlightenment itself. You go, Pat.”

“I happen to be a conservative Republican, but I define conservatism as government staying out of my personal decisions, and recognizing everyone as valued members of the American family. It was a conservative Supreme Court that just wrote the most significant legal decision in the history of gay and lesbian civil rights. It was Anthony Kennedy, appointed by Ronald Reagan, who wrote this decision that we’re heralding as the greatest victory in the history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement….”

“I’ve never said that [I’m against gay marriage], as a matter of fact. What I believe in is equal rights under the law for every single American. We chose to do civil unions in Vermont because we believe that marriage should be left to the churches and that equal rights under the law is what the state owes everybody.”

“I have said that I’m against gay marriage, because marriage has special status in our culture, our society, our history. And yet, I’ve worked very aggressively to protect ... gay and lesbian couples step-by-step, practical-step-by-practical-step, real-inequity-by-real-inequity from the burden of those inequities, and that’s exactly what I would do as president.”