When I read Rep. Dean Clukey’s column, I, like Michael McCabe (“A reasoned approach” (BDN, April 18), found his reasoning clever.

Unlike McCabe, however, I also found it specious and didn’t think it would convince anyone who didn’t already share Clukey’s opposition to equal rights for everyone. Clukey’s argument was a legalistic one, namely that since gays and lesbians are not a distinct social class, they do not qualify for protected status.

Of course, this point has its merits, but it wholly misses the real point. What is at issue is not whether gays and lesbians can be defined as a distinct social class but whether discrimination against such individuals occurs.

The fact is that it does. It’s discrimination that is immoral and unconstitutional, not legalistic definitions that make it so. Everyone, of whatever opinion or orientation, should and must have legal protection when they are being unfairly treated.

As a former teacher of logic, I am embarrassed when human reasoning, always fragile, is twisted in the service of injustice. The headline of Clukey’s column offers another example of bad logic and is regularly repeated by the partisans of prejudice.

The law recently passed by the state Legislature does not give anyone special status but only safeguards everyone’s rights. Those so-called defenders of morality and the family are themselves neither moral nor Christian when they hide their intolerance behind a religion and a morality of love and acceptance.

Mainers, and everyone, deserve better.

Arnold Berleant

Castine