I have not been on my best blogging form this week, which has been a busy one for me. One reason was the heavier-than-usual reaction to my column about gay marriage that appeared in Wednesday's newspaper.

By my count, I got 38 e-mails and half a dozen phone calls. This isn't a huge outpouring when considering the circulation of the PG -- and compared with my colleague, Tony Norman, this is nothing. He only has to write "it was a nice day" and 20 people write to tell him that he has a way with words another 20 criticize him for saying the day was nice.

(Am I jealous? Yes.)

But I try to answer each and every e-mail I receive as a matter of courtesy, even when the messages are from Neanderthals. (They are a dying species; I feel the need to be kind to them.)

By the way, if you ever sent me an e-mail and I didn't reply, that means I didn't get it -- unless you are a known pest and have been put on my List of Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth because I refuse to correspond with chronic morons.

As it happens, the response to the column was overwhelmingly positive, which was very encouraging. My column is usually written on the premise that many a true word is spoken in jest but some readers just don't get the joke. In turn, they don't get the true word either. Though this is depressing, it underscores my theory that a sense of humor is always the most reliable indicator of intelligence.

On the opposition to gay marriage, I have a theory. Some people oppose gay marriage out of a sincere religious conviction, which I understand and respect (even as I differ with them). Some are in denial and act out in destructive ways -- J. Edgar Hoover, Sen. Larry Craig, he of the wide stance in bathroom stalls -- and this I understand and do not respect.

But some, I theorize, do it out of what I call the "clubhouse mentality." I do not respect this either.

Ever since the dawn of time, one group has looked down upon another. The hominids looked down on the Neanderthals, the Egyptians looked down on the Israelites, the British looked down on everyone (and still do).

In America, we have always seen it. The rich whites looked down on the poor whites, who looked down on the blacks, who looked down on who knows who? -- the Mexicans probably. I doubtless have left out a few groups who were looked down upon and did some looking down in turn.

All this is deplorable, of course, but I seek to describe the world as I find it. This instinct is obvious even in small children. They build little clubhouses and put up signs in a childish script saying the traditional "No girlz allowed."

When the boys grow up, some of them join private clubs where the same premise is brought to the full flower of adulthood. It's not just girlz, although at some clubs women are still discriminated against. In recent memory right here in Pittsburgh, not only were people of color excluded from some of the best clubs but Jews and Catholics as well. Vestiges of this ridiculous mind-set remain unto the present day.

Human beings, it seems, want to have exclusive lairs where they can be happy in the knowledge that not all of the human tribe can become members.

Which brings me back to membership in that exclusive club called marriage. To me, it seems illogical for straight people to think that a gay married couple down the road might undermine their own marriage.

But I have come to think that for some people, the old clubhouse mentality lurks on gay marriage as strongly as it does for a well-tailored old codger becoming florid at the thought of the wrong sort of people being admitted into the Duquesne Club.

Just a theory. If true, what can be done? All I can think of is to tell one jest at a time, so that the old world looks stupid in the light of the new.

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