STANFORD, Calif. (AP) - Homosexual rights leader Evan Wolfson criticized conservative groups for their intolerance toward same-sex marriage in a rare, face-to-face debate between leaders on opposite sides of the issue.

Wolfson, the executive director of Freedom to Marry, debated the Rev. Lou Sheldon, the chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, in an event Wednesday night at Stanford Law School.

Wolfson said people pushing for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage are “using government as a weapon to impose their religious view on others.”

Sheldon countered by appealing to common sense and the will of the majority in defending his position that marriage should be reserved for relationships between a man and a woman.

“Normal people who are in a good relationship in their marriage, who have children, and who are experiencing the union of that marriage in a number of ways, just shake their heads and say, ‘How is this possible?’” Sheldon said of the push for gay marriage. “Those of us who are heterosexual realize that there is not a prejudice, it’s just something that doesn’t set right.”

Sheldon faced laughter and jeers from an audience composed mainly of students who tended to agree with Wolfson that gay marriage is a civil rights issue. Sheldon said afterward that Wolfson “was constantly trying to demonize me, and he used all the right buzzwords to play to the audience.”

Sheldon cited polls showing the majority of Californians and of all Americans oppose same-sex marriage. In 2000, 61 percent of Californians voted to approve Proposition 22, which said the state could only recognize marriages between a man and a woman.

Arguing that homosexuality is not a genetic trait, Sheldon said gays do not qualify for the legal protections of minority groups and called for “activist judges” to refrain from interfering with the democratic process.

But Wolfson cast the gay marriage issue as an inextricable element of the broader civil rights struggle, noting that public opinion was also against interracial marriage when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictions on it in 1967.

“Our country is stronger because the courts, and ultimately the rest of us, had the courage to face up to the need to change the way we were treating people in our midst,” he said.

In the case of gay marriage, he said, “The courts are increasingly finding there’s no good reason for that discrimination.”

Arguments about whether the plight of gays can be fairly compared to that of blacks in the 1960s figured prominently in the debate, which comes two weeks after the California Chapter of the NAACP endorsed a bill to legalize gay marriage in the state.

Sheldon warned that if gay marriage is legalized, it will “undermine society’s most vital and basic institution, the family.”

“The institution includes men, women and children and it is the children that suffer, for there is no substitute for the role of a father, and there is no substitute for the role of a mother.”

Wolfson responded that what’s best for a child is a stable, loving, two-parent family, not necessarily a mother and a father.