Andrew, I don’t think that MacDonald’s actual words support your construction. She would have to have put “may” in front of “view” or replaced “They” with “Some of them.” And even on your construction, it’s a little odd. She gives three examples of conservative beliefs that atheist/agnostic conservatives may hold–and one of them is a belief that few of them probably do? If her atheist/agnostic conservatives hold the beliefs which she attributes to them, there probably aren’t enough of them for a political movement to worry about. If they don’t hold those views, then she ought to spell out the nature of their conservatism better than she has done. Then we can figure out how many people she’s really talking about.

Here’s an email from a reader:

I am an atheist and a conservative and am somewhat uncomfortable with the overt religiosity of many GOP activists. I don’t have a problem with same sex marriage and would vote in favor of an initiative that legalized it in my home state (Washington). What I do have a problem with is the court system imposing same sex marriage undemocratically. This is a rather lonely place to be, and the news that there are others that share my views would be welcome (any more email saying the same thing?).
I think that our best judges are those able to say “I think a policy of X is the best policy and is also the only moral policy that our government can adopt. However, the judiciary is not empowered to enact such a policy. The legislature is the proper place to decide this issue” The reverse also applies (“This law is awful and evil and the worst thing in the world, but the state of X has the power to enact it.”)

(I think this correspondent wanted to go on a bit more, but our email program cut him off.) I agree with him about the judges; and no, I haven’t gotten any other emails on these lines, at least today.

And for still more on same-sex marriage, check out the exchange between Robert P. George and Jonathan Rauch about its relation to polygamy. Here are the first, second, third, and fourth entries.