WHY CONSERVATIVES ARE DEMOCRATS AND LIBERALS AREN'T

Fridays with Florence: Gay Marriage — a Dead Cert (Florence King, National Review, 6/3/96) (reprinted at NRO, 3/26/04)

The major brainwashing, soon to begin, will proceed as follows.

Magazines will run cover stories that thinking Americans — all 17 of us — recognize as that brand of persuasion called "nibbled to death by a duck." Time does "Debating Same-Sex Marriage" and Newsweek does "Rethinking Gay Marriage." Lofty opinion journals weigh in with "A Symposium on," "In Defense of," and "Voices from," while Parade does "If They Say 'I Do' . . . Will We Say 'You Can't?'" Cover art consists of a pair of wedding rings sporting identical biological signs: two arrow-shooting circles for men, two mirror-handle circles for women. We will start seeing these logos in our sleep.

Next, the pundits. Molly Ivins writes "Bubba, Hold Yore Peace." Ellen Goodman waxes earnest about tradition versus change in "Something Old, Something New," Ruth Shalit writes something borrowed, and Richard Cohen, Victim America's identifier-in-chief, does a column called "We're All Single." Arianna Huffington will figure out a compassionate way to be against gay marriage, but most conservatives stand to fare badly in this debate. Will Durant wrote, "When religion submits to reason it begins to die." In a media-saturated society teeming with talk-show producers casting dragnets over think tanks, proponents of gay marriage win merely by being scheduled. By contrast, the conservative instinctively recoils from analyzing eternal verities. He may know the words to legal arguments such as "the need to show a compelling state interest, etc." but he doesn't know the tune. In the final analysis he believes in the sanctity of marriage "just because."

OJ's link to a Florence King column below prompted me to reread some of her greatest hits on NRO. None are better than this column. What an ear Ms. King has for the pomposities and stale rhetoric of the liberal media. How many times over the last few years have we seen those linked wedding rings she predicted in 1996?

In the end, though, she is too pessimistic, as misanthropes tend to be when making predictions about America. Not that she is wrong about conservatives' inability to argue with liberals on the liberals' terms. But, where ever Americans get to vote on their inchoate understanding of the world, gay marriage is stymied. Naturally, the left wants these decisions taken away from the forum in which they lose -- the voting booth -- and sent to the forum in which they win -- the media and the courts. Voting, however, is slowly but surely making the even the courts uncongenial. The liberals have been reduced to seeking victory in a handful of state courts, and even there they have lost. It is likely no coincidence that judges never face the electorate in the only state where the left has won on gay marriage and that, in that state, the left is trying its best to make sure that gay marriage never makes the ballot.

So the left is, more and more, turning to a new tactic. We are all agreed Americans must be free from any governmental compulsion to belong to a specific religion, or even to believe in any god at all. Now the left argues that no policy is legitimate if it is supported by a religious impulse. This is a complete break from the past, when all the great campaigns for American progress -- independence, abolition, robust militarism, temperance and civil rights -- were expressly and unabashedly religious.

This nonsense has already made in-roads. In its Lawrence decision striking down anti-sodomy laws and in the Goodridge decision requiring gay marriage, the Supreme Court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court have held that morality is not, in and of itself, a rational basis for any law. On the one hand, this might seem clearly true -- morality makes no pretense of rationality. On the other hand, "rational" is in this instance a term of art and no law is within the power of the state unless rationally related to a legitimate state end. In other words, it is beyond the scope of the legislature or, at least at the state level, the people to adopt a law simply because it is moral. The law is now expressly amoral.

That rationality requires the law to be amoral is, to the conservative, non-sense. Taken as a whole, only the moral society is rational. An amoral society would be an impoverished dictatorship; if no person could trust another and neither the citizen nor the government could rely on the other, civil society would be dead. The best we could hope for would be tribalism or sectarianism such as we've seen in Lebanon and Somalia. The same result would come if the legislature weren't prohibited, by the people, from passing immoral laws. In a successful society, morality is both a necessary and sufficient basis for law. That is the only rational conclusion that can be drawn, regardless of whether every jot and tittle of our moral code can be justified rationally.

Posted by David Cohen at July 30, 2006 9:49 AM