Conservatives understand the stakes of gay marriage

Social conservatives are naturally inclined to portray evolution as revolution, but they’re substantially correct about same-sex marriage.  Rhetoric like “It doesn’t effect your marriage” suggests gay marriage is just a minor legal tweak, when it’s more like one victory in an ongoing gender revolution.  I broadly agree with NRO’s Dennis Prager in his response to Republican Jon Huntsman’s recent endorsement of marriage equality:

I believe that the ultimate aim of the LGBT movement and the rest of the cultural Left is nothing less than to end gender distinctions.

It’s obviously a generalization that ignores a lot of gay/trans/feminist infighting, but yes, leftists generally do think most gender distinctions are pointless and poisonous.  But these intuitions are so deep that we’re baffled when conservatives say things like:

…the consequences of redefining marriage — asking children if they hope to marry a boy or a girl when they get older, banning religious adoption agencies from placing children first with a married man and woman, denying the importance of both sexes in making families, choosing boys to be high-school prom queens and girls to be high-school prom kings, and much more…

we think, “Do they realize how ridiculous that sounds?”  And the answer is no, they don’t, because it isn’t ridiculous to them.  Any major change in marriage–and officially declaring that gender is irrelevant is a major change–is a potential threat to the institution.  As Jennifer Thieme at the Christian Post puts it:

Gay marriage does not exist as a stand-alone policy issue.  Nor is it a conservative issue, because it requires the natural family to be dismantled at the level of public policy. True conservatives support limited government, and they understand that there are other institutions which serve to limit government power. Two of these institutions are the natural family and religion.

There’s truth here.  Families, churches, and the state provide overlapping economic goods: healthcare, food, housing and job training.  That means a larger state can make traditional family roles less important.

I think gender-role-based nuclear families unfairly task husbands with being sole “providers”and make wives into dependent unpaid laborers, and I’d feel more economically secure getting welfare from a legally accountable bureaucracy that doesn’t get frustrated if I don’t want to have sex or go to church.  Same-sex marriage to me is the culmination of decades of feminist work to build relationships on joy rather than economic obligation.  But if you like the old model, it’s a nightmare.

A few poems about politics

Rapture Ready
Christians for Herod
backing Jews for Goliath
No room in the inn

Apologies to the Eighteenth Century
That monstrous Beast, the People assembl’d
Mobocrats clamour! a Terrible sound:
That the High shall be least! And the paupers resembl’d
A HAMMER Almighty, pinning kings to the Ground.

Burke
There’s a certain little quirk
In the thinking of a fellow
Of a man named Edmund Burke
And followers of his, less mellow:
Though their logic’s often right
That quick upheaval devastates
They never realize that they fight
The losing side in all debates

Liberals
Look! The liberals appear
The group that studiously shuns
Revolt, for common sense is clear:
Police alone should have the guns.

History, they say, has closed
“Don’t kill the tyrants! Dock their pay.”
For weddings, armies, CEOs
Are quite alright if they are gay

Obamacore

Down on the Corner, Stanley Kurtz says compliant statehouse Republicans are “selling their constitutional birthright for a mess of pottage” by adopting Obama-backed federal core curriculum standards.  I don’t have strong opinions on the federalism of the case (or in any case really–there are plenty of bullies, big and small), but this particular argument struck me as odd:

Technically, the new non-fiction requirements can be satisfied in classes other than English. In practice, however, with science teachers unwilling to assign essays, English classes are forced to junk Huckleberry Finn in favor of readings such as “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management.” The potential for political abuse in a curriculum heavy with government documents and news articles should be obvious. Given the politics of most teachers, the new non-fiction requirements create a huge opening for leftist indoctrination. And that’s only the beginning of the potential political abuses of the Common Core.

Shaky premises about fiction notwithstanding, after skimming his one example of dangerous non-fiction I’m with him on the larger point, because Executive Order 13423 is dull as dogshit.  Obama should just make Kurtz happy and let kids read The Handmaid’s Tale instead.

Prager on public nudity

Dennis Prager at NRO is worried about nudity.

As I’m neither Jewish nor Christian, I don’t feel comfortable arguing on “Judeo-Christian” grounds that Prager is getting his own religion wrong.  I’ll leave that to the leftists and the nudists who also claim Christianity.  But like Prager, I think a lot about naked people, and our relationship to the rest of the natural world, and his half-assed musings disappointed me.

But one of our human tasks is to elevate ourselves above the animal. And covering our genitals is one important way to do that.

The world of the Left generally finds this animal–human distinction unnecessary. For years now, I have been reading article after article in major liberal newspapers and magazines about how much more alike humans and animals are than we ever thought. The theme of these articles is how narrow the differences really are between humans and animals.

Public nudity certainly forwards that theme.

Major newspapers and magazines write about how similar we are to other animals because in many surprising ways, we are similar to them, and many readers find joy in learning about our kinship with them.  It’s interesting to me, though, how Prager is so defensive about it.  The argument that we must separate ourselves from animals by law is ridiculous not because we’re the same but because the relevant differences in abstract thought are so perfectly clear.  Nobody, not even the most radical of animal rights activist, suggests we prosecute lions for murder, even though we agree that humans should be.  That’s because, as far as anyone can tell, people are uniquely able and thus expected to engage in moral reasoning.

But Prager concedes his point too soon:

And it’s hard to see why a liberal judge would not rule the law unconstitutional. Because the fact is that there is no secular reason to ban public nudity.

C’mon, try harder!  Religious-inspired laws without any secular purposes are indeed unconstitutional, and you don’t need to be a liberal to acknowledge the First Amendment.  If religion is the only reason to ban public nudity, it should be legal.

Yet nudity laws remain on the books in almost every state.  A majority of a board popularly elected by the citizens of San Francisco supports the laws.  This suggests there may be good reasons for them (public hygiene, preventing sexual harassment) that aren’t based in a religion of shame.  But in an article purporting to explain “Why Public Nudity is Wrong”, Prager just throws a pity-party and then gives up.