There was some highly entertaining testimony yesterday in the Prop 8 trial. It was from William Tam, who worked on behalf of Prop 8. Tam had originally been a party to the case, but he dropped out because his theories would have come off as too batshit crazy. But Olson and Boies subpoenaed him as a witness anyway to showcase how nutty some of the Prop 8 people are. And Tam certainly delivered. He even admitted that his fears about marriage equality are “paranoid.”

His testimony starts on page 145 of yesterday’s transcript. Below is the first example I saw of how reasoned argument can be used to demolish inflammatory rhetoric; this starts on page 182. The questions were asked by David Boies.

Q. And you say: “The San Francisco city government is under the rule of homosexuals.” Do you see that?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you believe that, sir?

A. Yes, I believed that.

Q. Who are the homosexuals that San Francisco is under the rule of?

A. Uhm, at that time, supervisor Tom Ammiano was a supervisor there.

Q. And there was also a mayor, right?

A. Yes.

Q. The mayor was a homosexual, was he, according to you?

A. I don’t think so.

Q. You don’t think so? No, I don’t think so either, actually. So if you knew the mayor wasn’t homosexual, why are you telling people in part of the Proposition 8 campaign that San Francisco is under the rule of homosexuals?

A. Uhm, well, you see, Mayor Newsom pass out the same-sex marriage licenses in 2004. And if he is not a friend of them, why would he do that?

Q. When you say that San Francisco was under the rule of homosexuals, did you mean San Francisco was under the rule of heterosexuals that were friends of homosexuals? Is that what you meant?

A. Could be.

Q. Could be.

A. Yeah, you know, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t write things so specifically. You know, that well-defined.

Yes, if you’re having a debate about the civil rights of human beings, it would be silly for the arguments to be “well-defined.” It’s much better to distort the truth.

You know, instead of allowing nutjobs to argue on cable TV and make outlandish claims that don’t get refuted, we should require every debate to be conducted in front of a judge, in a civilized, rational manner, because that’s how the truth really comes out.

Tam unintentionally admits the real truth on pages 221-222:

[I]f the name of “marriage” is not so narrow, which is between people of different — different blood, of different — of age above 18, then our children — you know, I always, we always look at things from the angle of a parent — that they would fantasize. Everyone fantasize whom they will marry when they grow up. So children will fantasize about marrying either a man or a woman. And to us parents — you may say that I’m a paranoid Chinese parent — we get very, very upset about that.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.