SEATTLE

The nation’s vigilant theocrats figured us out. We can’t slip anything past them. It’s not the right to marry that we’re after — to make the same commitment that our straight peers are automatically able to, even if they’re thrice divorced, tipsy and standing before an Elvis impersonator in Vegas. It’s the nation’s young. We’re out to recruit the next generation, plump up our ranks and pave the way to a gay utopia in which the Tony Awards get higher Nielsen ratings than the Super Bowl and we all dance at the inauguration of President Ellen DeGeneres.

Please. If you think we have time for such elaborate stratagems, you underestimate how many hours we put in at the gym. Besides which, I prefer football to “Footloose,” and I can round up plenty of other gay men who are with me on that, along with lesbians more loyal to “The View” than to “Ellen.”

On this Election Day, citizens in four states are weighing in on same-sex marriage. Minnesotans are deciding whether to ban it in their Constitution, but here in Washington and in Maine and Maryland as well, the issue is whether to permit it, and a majority of “yes” votes would mark the first time that a state has done so by popular referendum.

That milestone seems within reach, and horrified opponents have responded with their favorite and nastiest scare tactic, the insinuation that America’s children are about to be corrupted. This fearmongering worked four years ago in California, where voters rejected same-sex marriage after the repeated broadcast of a commercial in which an adorable little girl exultantly informs her aghast mother that in school that day, she learned that princes could marry princes and that she could marry a princess. A stern-looking man then sweeps in to warn viewers that they will be saying O.K. to such ostensible brainwashing if they let gay couples say “I do.”

The analogous commercial this year spotlights David and Tonia Parker, who insist that after Massachusetts began to allow same-sex marriage in 2004, their son and other children were forced to learn about homosexual relationships in school. While it’s true that some schools mentioned same-sex couples in diversity discussions, it wasn’t mandated by the state or connected to the advent of same-sex marriage, and the referendums this Election Day say nothing at all about curriculums. Moreover, a federal court that heard a lawsuit by the Parkers rightly determined that a cursory reference to gay couples in classrooms “does not constitute ‘indoctrination,’ ” as the Parkers had claimed.

David Parker is just a textbook homophobe in the garb of a humbly concerned parent. He has likened homosexuality to alcoholism and equated teachers who mention it to sexual predators using foul language in the park.

He and his ilk love to link gay rights with sexual predation. An ad used in Florida in 2009 shows a blond girl in a pink T-shirt entering a playground restroom; seconds later, a man in a baseball cap and sunglasses follows her in. The commercial then claims that the Gainesville City Commission made this legal, presumably by including transgendered people in an anti-discrimination ordinance that covered public accommodations.

As for anti-gay crusaders’ fixation with indoctrination, I’d like them to explain how so many of us turned out gay or lesbian despite having straight parents and, in my day, being exposed to movies, TV shows and Top 40 songs that portrayed an almost exclusively heterosexual world.

I’d also like them to meet Jeff DeGroot, 27, a law student here who has been giving public speeches in support of the Washington referendum. He grew up in Oregon with two mothers — “the most wonderful parents in the world,” he told me — who went to all his hockey games, nagged him about his homework and have now been together for 38 years. They were even married to each other briefly after a county clerk in Oregon began to grant same-sex marriage licenses in 2004. The Oregon Supreme Court nullified those weddings the following year, devastating them, he said.

Surely, I remarked, his upbringing had made him homosexual.
He laughed. “My girlfriend would have something to say about that,” he said.

You are who you are. And that’s all that Jeff and I and others who endorse same-sex marriage want anyone to be.

I have 11 nieces and nephews, the oldest of whom is 16, and do you know how many times I’ve discussed my sexual orientation with her? Zero. She knows I’m gay, knows my partner — and that’s that. Instead we talk about the New York Giants, whom she roots for, and the Denver Broncos, my team.

The Broncos won on Sunday. I’ve decided to treat that as an omen that at least one of the same-sex marriage referendums will succeed, and that unjustified fears and an unjustifiable inequality are in retreat.