People often ask me what I think about ex-gay ministries. I have no objection to them in principle, but serious problems with them in practice.

I have no objection to them in principle because I believe we should give others the same respect that we ourselves demand. That includes giving people wide latitude about living their lives as they see fit. If you really believe that you're heterosexual deep down, and you want to take steps to help realize that identity, far be it from me to insist otherwise. I'll let you be the expert on what you feel deep down, as long as you show me the same courtesy.

In fact, many ex-gays do not show me the same courtesy. I've had several tell me, "C'mon-deep down you know that being gay is wrong." I know no such thing, and I resent it when other people tell me what I know "deep down." So let's make a deal: you don't tell me what I know deep down, and I won't tell you what you know deep down.

I'm not denying that people are capable of deep self-deception; indeed, I know it firsthand. For years I insisted that I was "really" straight, even though (1) I had gay feelings, (2) I had no straight feelings, and (3) I knew that people with gay feelings but no straight feelings are gay. (This, from someone who would later teach elementary logic.) Somehow, by not letting my thoughts "touch," I could avoid drawing the feared conclusions from them.

Maybe ex-gays are engaged in similar self-deception; maybe not. The point is that it's their feelings, their life, their decision to make. So I won't oppose their efforts in principle.

In practice, I have at least three serious problems with ex-gay ministries.

The first is their tendency to promote myths about the so-called "homosexual lifestyle" by generalizing from some people's unfortunate personal experiences. Ex-gay spokespersons will often recount, in lurid detail, a life of promiscuity, sexual abuse, drug addiction, loneliness, depression, and so on. "That is what I left behind," they tearfully announce, and who can blame them? But that experience is not my experience, and it's by no means typical of the gay experience. To suggest otherwise is to spread lies about the reality of gay and lesbian people's lives. (The best antidote for this is for the rest of us to tell our own stories openly and proudly.)

The second problem is the ex-gay ministries' abuse of science. Many of its practitioners are engaged in "therapy" even though they are neither trained nor licensed to do so; some of that "therapy" can cause serious and lasting psychological damage. Ex-gay ministries tend to lean on discredited etiological theories-domineering mothers, absent fathers, and that sort of thing. They also tend to give false hope to those who seek such therapy. By all respectable accounts, only a tiny fraction of those who seek change achieve any lasting success. Even then it's unclear whether feelings, or merely behaviors, have been changed. While we shouldn't reject individuals' reports of change out of hand, nor should we pretend that their experience is typical or likely.

The third and related problem is that many ex-gay ministries promote not merely a "change," but a "cure." "Cure" implies "disease," which homosexuality is not. Insofar as ex-gay ministries promote the long-discredited notion that homosexuality is a psychological disorder, I oppose them. ("Spiritual" disorders are another matter, but then we've left the realm of science for that of religion. Ex-gay ministries have an unfortunate habit of conflating science, religion, and politics.)

I am not at all threatened by the notion that some people can change their sexual orientation, if indeed they can. In reality, it seems that at best only a small number can do so, and only with tremendous effort. But if they can, and that makes them happy, good for them. I'm confident enough in my own happiness that I need not doubt theirs.

Nor do I feel the need to insist that I was "born this way." Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. What I can say with confidence is that these feelings are a deep and fulfilling part of who I am, and I see no reason to mess with them. Quite the contrary.

So when ex-gays announce, from billboards and magazine ads, that "Change is possible," I say: Possible? Maybe. Likely? No. Desirable? Not for me, thanks.

For the most part-allowing for occasional lapses of taste-I don't write about politics, at least not about the horse-race aspects of which candidates are ahead, which will come out on top, which of their strategies did and didn't work, etc. I follow those matters with some interest but with a sense of detachment. I am not part of that process.

For one thing, there are plenty of other writers in the mainstream and gay press, and innumerable bloggers, television commentators and talk radio personalities who eagerly share their opinions and speculations. I doubt if I have anything new and significant to add, anything that some or all of them haven't already said.

So far as indicating a preference for one candidate over another, whether openly or between the lines, there hardly seems much point. To do that would be an exercise in egotism. I write for a limited-circulation newspaper. Nothing I write is going to affect the outcome of an election. Then too, I understand my job to be writing about gay issues, broadly conceived, and I figure that most people already know who the gay-supportive candidates are.

Nor do I have much enthusiasm for any of the candidates who are or have been running. They all have a few good points on gay or other issues and a large number of bad points: I generally tend to agree more with the criticism candidates make of one another than I do with the candidates themselves. The most that could be said of any of them is that they seem less bad than the others.

It is no secret that I am, on the whole, a libertarian, meaning that I view governments (city, state, federal) with deep suspicion. Government is a Borg, constantly grasping more power, more control, more of our money.

I am in favor of both economic and civil liberties. Economic liberties include lower taxes (for everyone), less government spending, and less government interference in the marketplace and our economic lives. Civil liberties include more freedom from government intrusion into our personal lives, free speech, personal privacy and property rights, abortion and drugs decriminalization. And this necessarily entails equal treatment of gays and heterosexuals.

None of the viable candidates believes anything like this. Which is not surprising because they are part of the government and have a vested interest in promising government policies using government power and government money (ultimately your tax money) for various constituencies.

So, I want there to be a line on the ballot that says "None of the Above." If that line got a majority, the parties would have to go back, find new policy packages and/or new candidates and try again in a second election in, say, three months. At the very least, "None of the Above" would be a safety valve for those of us who feel dissatisfied with the "choices" we are offered.

To be sure, there is the small Libertarian Party which espouses libertarian principles. And I have voted for its candidates pretty regularly in national elections since they first ran a candidate in 1972. The candidate that year was University of Southern California philosophy professor John Hospers who had just written a book called "Libertarianism." As I recall, he got about 6,000 votes nationwide.

I remember casting a write-in vote for Hospers that was almost not counted. A major-party election judge was about to throw out my ballot as a joke vote like Mickey Mouse when a friend of mine stepped in to explain that Hospers was a real candidate of a real party. Hospers also got one vote in the electoral college from a renegade Republican elector in Virginia.

People sometimes say, "But you're throwing away your vote. Don't you want your vote to count?" But I defy anyone to show me that their precious little vote made any difference in any election they have ever voted in. If it didn't, then their vote didn't "count" any more than mine did. They might as well have gone to Starbucks and had an espresso instead of voting.

In fact, we might say my vote "counted" more than theirs because my vote was a larger portion of the vote for the candidate I voted for than theirs was of the candidate they favored.

There you have it. I don't like the major-party candidates, so I vote Libertarian. Is that a protest vote? In a sense, yes. But, of course, I am also voting for what I believe. If I voted for "None of the Above" it wouldn't be clear what I was for. But "None of the Above" should be on the ballot for people to vote for if they aren't libertarian.

Civil unions are a failed experiment.

I didn't say that. Lynn Fontaine Newsome did.

Newsome is president of the New Jersey State Bar Association, and she was testifying in September about the effectiveness of the civil union law in New Jersey.

Needless to say, she doesn't think they are working well.

Nor does Ed Barocas, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, who said, "By creating a separate system of rights . . . the civil union law has failed to fulfill its promise of equality."

And in the end, neither does the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission itself, which concluded last week that the idea of civil unions confuses the public and establishes a "second-class status" for the gays and lesbians who are bound together under them.

Civil unions are a failed experiment. We have tried them, and they have failed.

This is important, because state governments are often considered labs for the federal government. The idea is, try something out on a smaller scale in the various states. If it works, consider it on the federal level. If it doesn't work, try something else.

New Jersey is instructive because of the sheer number of problems the law has had in its year of existence. The State Supreme Court instructed that gays and lesbians must be treated equally, leaving it up to the legislature to determine how.

The legislature, in turn, granted gays and lesbians civil unions instead of marriage.

New Jersey has 2,329 couples in civil unions and 56 who have affirmed unions from other states; the New York Times reports that 568 couples have complained to Garden State Equality that they have not, in fact, been treated equally.

Those complaints have ranged from human resources computer systems having no category for "civil unions" to military members who are afraid to be "unioned" lest they be outing themselves under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," to companies directly violating the law because they didn't understand that unions granted the same state rights as marriage.

Happily, not only do we have a few failed civil union experiments (Vermont experts testified as well), but we have one very successful equal marriage experiment: Massachusetts.

The Massachusetts experts who testified said that their state had none of the issues of New Jersey.

Before the provocative results of these experiments, many of us felt that civil unions might be a fine idea. Like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, we thought - just give people their full rights and call it anything you want. Who cares if it's called marriage? A word is just a word. If labeling this packet of rights "civil unions" is what it takes to bring equality to gays and lesbians, then for heaven's sake, call that packet "civil unions."

Unfortunately, the experiment of New Jersey proves that the words matter very much.

Civil unions really are perceived as separate and unequal, both by the people who get "unioned" and by the lawyers, officials and civil servants who need to deal with the tangles civil unions create.

Additionally, though, New Jersey gives us an inefficiency argument that might help sway fiscal (if not social) conservatives. Why force thousands of businesses to change established forms, computer programs and policies to accommodate civil unions, when forms, programs and policies are already in place for marriage?

Wouldn't just calling gays and lesbians "married" be easier for everyone concerned?

In a way, it's great that New Jersey decided on civil unions first, because they took the time to review the policy. Civil unions in New Jersey gave people a chance to see what a world with heterosexual marriage and homosexual civil unions looks like - by watching New Jersey struggle with it, we've gotten a chance to kick the tires and look under the hood, to discover the certainty that this vehicle won't move anyone forward.

Now we have proof. Marriage is more than just a word that will make us "feel" equal - marriage is a word that will actually move us toward equal. Which means we can no longer be contented by presidential candidates who tell us that they will give us all of the rights without the word.

I mean, just imagine the tax payer dollars that would need to be paid to change thousands of federal forms to include "civil unions" when "marriage" is there already and is a word everyone already understands.

Civil unions are a failed experiment. There is no need to try it on a national level - it has already been tried and failed. We need federal marriage.