On Thursday, Rod Dreher publicized a very meritorious essay by Megan McArdle on A Libertarian View of Gay Marriage. The piece dates “to a few years back, when she was writing as ‘Jane Galt.’ Let me be clear: in the piece, McArdle explicitly takes no position for or against SSM (I don’t know where she stands on the issue today). She does a great job, though, of presenting a key conservative objection to SSM.”
He’s right that she does a great job, but my excerpts are different than Dreher’s:
For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.
…
[A]s G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don’t see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it:In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
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My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes … If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that’s either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I’m a little leery of letting you muck around with it.
(Emphasis added)
Perhaps Chesterton distilled his fence example further. I know I’ve heard it as “Never tear down a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
Galt/McArdle illustrates this precautionary principle with no fewer than three parallel progressive efforts where conservative concerns were dismissed as stupid, but turned out to be understated relative to the devastation that followed the ignoring of their cautions. That’s why I join Dreher in recommending that you read the whole thing.
Perhaps the most pernicious fault of progressives is their obliviousness to the possibility that their motives are mixed:
Justice Cardozo once observed that every principle tends “to expand itself to the limit of its logic.” The course of assisted suicide legislation has thus far validated that prediction. Through the expanding legalization of assisted suicide, America has begun to target some people for death. It is plain that the rising acceptability of assisted suicide is tied to the decline in religious belief. A nation that forgets God will forget that human life is sacred, and we are becoming that nation. In the void we are creating, we have substituted for God an image of ourselves—autonomous, self-sufficient, complete.
People with disabilities in particular put the lie to that image. We are the public evidence that all humans are finite, dependent, broken. We are the constant reminder that humans are not the final masters of their fate. As a consequence, our presence is deeply unwelcome. When possible, we are prevented from being born at all. Otherwise, though we are welcomed in public and even lip-service is paid to our equal worth, we are subtly invited to leave, even offered assistance in making our final exit.
(Stephen L. Mikochik, Targeting People for Death, emphasis added)
I have noted the same sort of subliminal message of life loathing over the last 30 years in liberal/progressive talk about abortion. I continue to marvel at the role reversal on the life issues in politics – supposedly ruthless conservatives oppose abortion, euthanasia etc., at least ritually, while supposedly compassionate liberals support them.
Rod Dreher takes the Cheney family kerfuffle as an occasion to muse on the threat the sexual revolution poses to religious freedom, first quoting a Jim Antle piece:
A viewpoint that was once acceptably held by the President of the United States—indeed, a viewpoint one had to hold to be elected president in the first place—is now considered rude to express in public. The Mary Cheneys who once allowed people to simultaneously support traditional marriage and avoid charges of bigotry against gays and lesbians have revoked that protection.
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[M]any of the biggest religious denominations in the country are for the foreseeable future committed to positions on marriage and sexuality that our society and law increasingly regard as morally equivalent to racism. Some state laws recognizing gay marriage also contain language protecting religious liberty—avoiding a freedom of conscience collision, while at the same time acknowledging the possibility of one.
To be clear: gay couples do not threaten anyone’s religious liberty or ability to form a family headed by a mom and a dad. But the view that traditional marriage—or the definition of marriage favored by the President of the United States until last year—was on the same moral plane as Jim Crow might.
I keep coming back to this point, as presumably does Dreher, because it’s true and valid.
Then Dreher quotes from a two-hour video symposium at the Newseum on the future of religious liberty:
That religious liberty is so tied up with questions of sexual freedom, [Douglas Laycock] says, “is turning much of the country against religious liberty, or at least turning much of the country to the view that religious liberty should be interpreted very narrowly.”
“What one side views as a grave evil, the other side views as a fundamental human right. And for tens of millions of Americans, conservative churches have made themselves enemies of liberty,” Laycock says.
How quickly things can change! With the current (irreversible?) collapse of Obamacare, Pat Buchanan plausibly sees Barack Obama as an anomalous liberal blip on an a mostly conservative radar screen since 1968:
Barack Obama … ran unapologetically as a man of the left. An opponent of the Iraq war, he had compiled a voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.
And Obama proudly placed his signature achievement, Obamacare, right alongside, and in the tradition of, liberal giants FDR and LBJ.
This is the new progressivism of the 21st century, Obama was saying, and I the transformational figure who will usher in the post-Reagan era. Where Clinton failed, I will succeed.
But now that Obamacare is coming to be perceived as a political catastrophe, not only does it threaten Obama’s place in history, it could invalidate, indeed, eviscerate the defining idea of the Democratic Party itself.
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It will likely be a long time before another Democratic president dares again another such Great Leap Forward.
Maybe. If he’s right, will the rejection of liberalism/progressivism, personified in the past 45 years by Obama, be accompanied by an atavistic rejection of African-American candidates?
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 