NEW YORK

--Reflexively, most of my fellow gays and lesbians embraced the Aug. 18 California Supreme Court decision requiring doctors to inseminate lesbians even if it violates the doctor's conscience. Such is the formulaic GayThink analysis of any issue: When gay equality comes into conflict with anything else, no matter how important--such as the welfare of children or religious freedom--gay equality wins.

But if you scratch beneath the surface and examine lesbian and gay cultural attitudes away from the political context, it becomes clear that deep down the sympathies of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Americans belong with the aggrieved doctors in the California case.

In the abstract, gays and lesbians tend to think of people like the doctors for Women's Care Medical Group as "haters" who are discriminating against people because of their sexual orientation. Because their religious beliefs lead to unacceptable outcomes (gasp, unequal treatment!), they should be forced to violate their consciences or to find another profession.

But in this specific case, the doctors were refusing to help a couple bring a baby into the world without a father. They probably believe, as I do, that children need fathers, and that deliberately denying your own child a father is selfish and cruel. The potential mothers could have chosen to adopt, and I would praise them if they did. But instead, they demanded that the doctors help them make a baby without a dad. The fact that children need fathers is a concept gays and lesbians have quite a bit of sympathy for, if their reactions to some popular phenomena of the summer of 2008 are to be believed.