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I try to stay out of the same-sex marriage argument. Mainly because I'm not gay and neither is anyone in my immediate family. Not that I know of, anyway.

Gay people I do know are no more evil/crazy than the people I go to church with, some of whom might be gay. Comes to that, church annoys me far more often than the fight over gay rights.

Whether gays can marry and have children ranks No. 3,291 on my List of Stuff I Should Worry About. It comes right after whether dogs will ever be able to vote (No. 3,290) and just before (No. 3,292) the possibility of participating in a sack race from here to Mexico.

But I might have to change my mind in light of the recent demonstration in the Capitol Rotunda by supporters of man-woman marriage.

Photos of the Utah Celebration of Marriage show some people who appear normal enough. Others look like the sort of people I might eventually push out of a lifeboat.

They all waved signs, some of which made no sense at all. One proclaimed: "Marriage means a mother and a father for every child," when in fact it doesn't.

Marriage actually means two people getting together with a 50 percent chance that both of them will stick around to raise whatever kids they have.

Another read: "A Mom and Dad in Every Child's Life." Again, it's a nice thought but far from a certainty.

But the rally (despite the misleading signs) got me thinking, a process from which no earthly good can come. Where I would be today had I been raised by gay parents?

I was raised by my mother "Mom" and my father "the Old Man," heterosexuals to the core. Even today, both will admit that raising me couldn't have been more challenging had Mom given birth to a badger.

Would it have been any easier if my parents had been the same gender?

It was a case I was fully prepared to argue until I had this sudden image of being shouted at by the Broom Rider, an older woman whose real name I forget or never actually knew. She tended my siblings and I after school when I was in the sixth grade.

"Just you wait until both your fathers get home, young man."

With all due respect to the really nice gay people out there, I'm not sure I would have survived being knuckle-nurtured by two fathers. Definitely not by two Old Mans.

If I refused to come down from a tree or a telephone pole, two fathers could chop it down twice as fast.

When I locked myself inside the car for safety, it was easy to slide back and forth to keep the doors locked while the Old Man tried to get in. With two working opposite sides of the car, I would have never made it past puberty.

I'm not sure how well I would have grown up with two moms. Every kid like me needs at least one parent willing to shelter him from the wrath of authority.

But had there been two Moms protecting me from consequences, I might have even less respect for authority than I do now, or no more than 1 percent of the recommended daily requirement.

But considering how I turned out with heterosexual parents, could gay parents really have done any worse? I don't think so. I say this because ultimately it was love rather than stereotypical roles that mattered.

I was raised by two parents who loved me enough to do the best they could with what they had to work with — and continued doing so when common sense and society might have suggested otherwise.

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