AB: You said to me once that the family is essential component to society. Can you elaborate on that, please?

SS: Marriage has been the stable, sexual arrangement. The family is the stable domestic life. There's no reason why two men or two women couldn't also form stable families. No civilized society can be civilized if people are having sex willy-nilly and reproducing all over. Well, society is a group of people. That society is organized by families. I mean, we're all members of the same society, we're all a part of American society, and there are also all these sub-groups. A society gets its lifeblood from more people joining it, and they have to be organized somehow, otherwise there's chaos.

AB: What do you think Martin Luther would say about gay marriage?

SS: Well, Martin Luther’s concept of marriage was more modern. It popularized this idea that marriage wasn't just for reproduction, preserving wealth, land or the family name. He also added in the emotional content. Marriage gave emotional benefits, as well as financial and reproductive benefits. He added that component, which is now the biggest component.

AB: And how does that affect the gay marriage argument?

SS: That's even more of an argument for same-sex marriage, because if the emotional component is the most important one – if reproduction can be handled in other ways, if both sides of the couple are economically independent – then it all comes down to the emotional component, the fact that you want to have someone to home to, that you want to be familiar with, that you want to come home to. That's part of the reason people form pairs. Why deny half the population the opportunity to have that and to have the benefits of that? We've slowly been moving the country to this merger of church and state that's totally unconstitutional. It's just hilarious that conservatives and Republicans say that the federal government should not intrude on people's lives, but they want to intrude on decisions like abortion and marriage. How is that not contradictory? Shouldn't conservatives prefer stable families, rather than unstable families? What does it matter who is the couple at the heart of the family, as long as the family is loving and stable?

AB: And what was the result of Luther and the Reformation?

SS: Well, the Reformation came around and the Protestants said, "Marriage is good, celibacy is bad." Lust is a natural instinct, you can't get rid of it like you can't get rid of hunger, but this what the early Christians tried to do. They started pushing this idea that if you have to be married, then the best form of marriage was a sexless one. This whole idea that sex was in and of itself a sin came with the Christians. Augustine wanted to get rid of the sex drive because his own was so powerful that he couldn't deal with it. These days, if you want to control lust – yes, people can go outside their marriage, but generally you know that when you get married, when you commit to someone else, whether you choose to observe it or not, everybody accepts the fact that you're supposed to be faithful. That does cut down on sex outside of that situation. So, why conservatives wouldn't want to support anything that cuts down on gay sex is beyond me, if it's so disgusting to them.