I think that gay marriage should be between a man and a woman.

The line is typically cited as an example of a rhetorical contradiction—pairing “gay marriage” with a definition that excludes same-sex couples. Read this way, it functions less as a coherent policy statement than as a revealing slip or sound-bite: it suggests either confusion about terminology or an attempt to signal opposition to same-sex marriage while softening the stance by using the phrase “gay marriage.” In quotation databases it is often used to illustrate how political language can collapse under imprecision, and how a single sentence can become memorable because its internal logic is self-negating.