The comment thread here has me wondering how many conservatives we actually have reading Secular Right.<\/p>\n
• The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. The idea of gay marriage emerged from the lunatic fringe around 10 years ago, I think. So for 130 years it occurred to practically nobody that the 14th implied gay marriage — surely not, I’ll wager, to anyone whose opinion carried jurisprudential weight. Now suddenly it’s clear as daylight to all but a minority of mentally-diseased reactionaries.<\/p>\n
That’s a point of view, but I’ll be damned if it’s a conservative<\/em> point of view. <\/p>\n • I can’t see the parallel with inter-racial marriage, which has been proscribed by law only spottily through history. (It obviously didn’t seem outrageous to Shakespeare and his audience.) Same-sex marriage has never, so far as I know, been proscribed by law anywhere, because it never occurred to lawmakers that it was a thing anyone would want to do! The human prejudice against same-sex marriage is far, far deeper-rooted than that against inter-racial marriage, a picayune thing by comparison, as witness the fact that legislatures had to draw up statutes about it. There are no laws against eating rocks.<\/p>\n (And I must say, I don’t actually see why communities shouldn’t<\/em> prohibit inter-racial marriage if they want to. I’d prefer not to live in such a community — given my domestic circumstances, in fact, I wouldn’t be able to! — but this doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable or immoral restriction for a state or country to impose on its citizens. But perhaps that’s just me. I simply don’t “get” the hysterical race panic that’s consumed so much rational thought in the modern West.)<\/p>\n • Hospital visiting. Still not getting it. If your hospital’s rules won’t allow gay lovers to visit, agitate to get the rules changed. What does this have to do with gay marriage? Sledgehammer, nut. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The comment thread here has me wondering how many conservatives we actually have reading Secular Right. • The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. The idea of gay marriage emerged from the lunatic fringe around 10 years ago, I think. … Continue reading