To be fair, the "punishing people who support gay rights" is legislation that would make it a felony to issue a marriage license to a gay couple, which is technically breaking a
federal law, albeit one that's never really been very strictly enforced. And there is a difference, at least in theory, between supporting criminalization of sodomy and opposing decriminalization of sodomy.
But yeah, while I do believe homosexuality is immoral from a Biblical perspective, I can't think of any good reason why it should be the government's business. Morality, like charity, cannot and should not be legislated. But then, I'm also not sure why marriage should be a government thing at all, as I've mentioned before a couple of times. Marriage is about a commitment made between two people and recognized by society, with each other, their peers, and the deity or lack thereof of their choice as their witnesses, not a piece of paper from the government. And since marriage as an institution is effectively a joint operation between the church and the state, forcing the government to change the definition of marriage would end with the government telling churches what they can and can't believe.
I say we move all the legal benefits of marriage into civil unions (as a contract drawn up between any two adults) and have marriage be solely a personal religious deal, with each diocese, each church council, and each individual deciding for themselves what kinds of marriages they'll recognize. The government doesn't have to dictate people's beliefs and no one's civil rights get violated. This would also solve the problem of people who want to get married but feel like the legal aspect cheapens what should be solely about love -- you can get married without getting a civil union. Most people would get them both, though.
Sidenote which will be irrelevant for most people here: At this point in my thinking, the social conservative in me protests, "Regardless of the gay issue, wouldn't removing the legal weight from marriage have the side effect of making people take marriage less seriously and lead to a societal collapse? Since people are less serious about religion, wouldn't making marriage just a religious institution increase the divorce rate even more?" Well, if people were only taking marriage seriously in the first place because of the legal benefits, then all it would do is reveal the truth rather than continuing a facade. When you open the curtains and the light shines in, you see dust on the table you thought was clean, but opening the curtains didn't create the dust -- it just showed you what was really there and forced you to be honest about the table's state of cleanliness. God cares about the heart, not appearances. So if this plan did end up leading to societal collapse, it would only be because we were headed there anyway.