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President Barack Obama has sealed his fate. Announcing his support of gay marriage, the president further alienated religious voters who believe marriage should be between a man and a woman.

Currently, there is no law that requires bureaucratic "sexing" of marriage applicants the way animals are examined for gender. They almost always take your word for it.

Right now, the government is more interested in whether you're marrying a sibling rather than someone of the same gender. You can keep your pants on during the application process and everything.

Makes sense. Science has conclusively proven that marrying your sister increases the likelihood of producing offspring incapable of being toilet trained until their mid-40s.

I'm not sure what science has proven about the biological downside of gay people getting married. My guess is … well, I don't really have one. I'm not gay and I'm already married, so mostly I don't care.

I do care about religious logic. As I understand it — incidentally a condition I never mistake for actual fact — denying gays the right to marry is largely based on religion.

I've heard most of the arguments: God doesn't like homosexuality. Satan does. The Bible says it's nasty. The mere thought makes your mom and the Holy Ghost faint. Stuff like that.

All of this might be true. Then again, it might not. How surprising would it be if you could fast forward time and learn gay people had been getting married for a century and the world was still ticking?

What if you got there and saw God was actually blessing people you once thought were wicked? He might. He blesses you and you're an idiot.

It's a fair question. How far into the future could you go before you no longer recognized your own church?

How far back would you have to travel before realizing that you were descended from theological dolts?

It's happened a lot with religious beliefs about human behavior. Not about gay people per se. They've pretty much always been evil to somebody. But what about witches?

For centuries, God-fearing mainstream Christians believed witches lived among regular people.

The only way of dealing with a witch was to burn or drown her. That way she couldn't turn somebody's grandma into an aardvark or, worse, marry another witch.

It was serious and holy business. A great deal of prayer, study and faith went into who needed burning. It wasn't something you wanted to get wrong. It would be a huge waste of wood.

Eventually, somebody figured out that maybe they had that whole witch thing wrong. Possibly God was a bit more even-tempered about certain things. Then the backtracking started.

Clergy: "OK, we were wrong about witches, unicorns, Negroes and hippies. And communists. Oh, and some of that stuff about women. Jews. Processed sugar. But we're not wrong about homosexuals! No sir. Not a bit. We got it right this time."

I'm not so sure. Given the state of the world and the way human beings treat each other over trifles, I'd say we haven't changed a bit.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/notpatbagley.