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re: #41 Gus
Republicans need to realize that supporting gay marriage won’t turn them gay. Neither will they burn in an imaginary hell for supporting said marriages.
Maybe Daniel and I are wrong about this; I certainly hope we are. I don’t think we are, and in any case, I don’t see why we should keep quiet about what we really think because it might discourage people. It has been my view since around 2008 that trads should focus all our activism and attention on erecting defensible perimeters for our liberties and the liberties of our institutions in a SSM environment. When the Senate Republicans, in the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election, couldn’t even get the Federal Marriage Amendment out of the Senate — and when our born-again Christian president wouldn’t fight for it, even though marriage trads had been key to the turnout that re-elected him — I knew then that we weren’t going to win this thing in the long run. Study after study confirms what I’ve seen anecdotally in my experience: the opposition to same-sex marriage is heavily concentrated among older people. Young people not only don’t share traditional beliefs on the issue, many of them aren’t even capable (or rather, willing) to take seriously the case for traditional marriage, even to reasonably disagree with it. Again, I urge you to read Daniel McCarthy’s essay, which draws heavily on the 1940s historical sociology of Carle C. Zimmerman. The push for same-sex marriage didn’t come from nowhere.
People like Rod and Maggie Gallagher have very different views on what constitutes religious freedom then what I was taught in school in my civics classes, it seems. He is utterly impenetrable on the subect beyond declaring that gay marriage is threat to his religious freedom. I still cannot figure out what the hell he even means, byond the occasional anecdote of some some priest getting hauled before a civil court in Europe. He seems to remain blissfully unaware that there is something called a 1st Amendment in this country.
