Manny Pacquiao is apparently a boxing legend and a member of Congress in the Philippines. According to a recent story on Breitbart.com, Mr. Pacquiao has been banned from making an appearance at an Los Angeles area shopping mall.  The sin that led to his excommunication was a statement, given in an interview, that one should “obey God’s law first before considering the laws of man. God only expects man and woman to be together and to be legally married. It should not be of the same sex, so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Most of the commenters on the site supported Pacquiano–though one of them was under the misapprehension that a shopping mall is free to ban anyone it dislikes from its premises.  Those were the days, my friends!

Breitbart has among its readers at least one Gay Rights advocate who made an hilarious historical argument:

Nero himself got married to two men…with all the pomp and ceremony of a traditional marriage.  You really ought to do some fact-checking before making yourself look like an idiot.

NOTE: This also blows away your “all cultures” of the last 25k years nonsense.  I’d blow it away more, with many other examples…but well, you’re probably just going to accuse me of having “made up” Cassius Dio, so we’ll just leave it at that, chief.

I should know better but I registered and posted this reply:

This is classic leftist disinformation.  The Roman government did not regulate marriage except insofar as it concerned legal questions like citizenship and inheritance, but Roman tradition was unequivocally a monogamous relationship between a man and a woman.  Nero was not only criminally insane, as his behavior shows, but a brutal murdering tyrant who had no regard for law.  He went through the same sort of mock-marriage farce that other homosexuals have done, but it was an outrageous breach of law and custom.  It was for such actions that he was assassinated.  It is really wonderful that Gay Rights advocates would chose the ancient Marquis de Sade as a role model.  Next they will be telling us that, because Caligula wanted to make his horse a consul, Roman animals had the right to vote and hold office.

The poor shnook turned out to be a hopeless case–a libertarian–and posted this non-reply:

So…you guys are just gonna attack ME, and completely ignore the fact that I just proved “CHAM4CONS” to be factually incorrect in his usage of Nero of an example of someone being opposed to gay marriage?

Classic conservative hypocrisy.  Can’t fight my argument, so you’ve gotta ignore it.

(And for the record, I’m a LIBERTARIAN…which means that I’m in favor of small government in ALL respects, including things like marriage…where you Conservatives are taking the extremely Statist, Authoritarian, and Big Government argument.  Guess you guys just LOVE your Nanny State…as long as the Nanny State is enforcing Christian “morality.”)

Why do I bother with this?  It’s mostly to test out our new features which will be a Chronicles blog for everyday trivia.  A free book or year’s subscription goes to whoever comes up with a name we can use for this.