Recently this extremely poor piece came out by Jason Lee Steorts, the managing editor of National Review.

In passing: A little googling has not turned up much about Steorts’s previous history, so perhaps my readers will know. Is this turn to the left on the issue of marriage any sort of surprise, or has Steorts always been a shallow social liberal, at least on this issue? All that I was able to find in a brief search was the fact that he has freaked out a couple of times at his own writers (once at Mark Steyn and once at Kathryn Jean Lopez) for their “rhetoric” in the vicinity of the issue of homosexuality. I suppose that was warning sign enough, but I still wonder if this is considered some kind of earthquake in conservative circles. It is, in any event, a sickening comment on how low National Review has fallen. So much for standing athwart the course of history crying, “Stop!”

The article as a whole is so jejeune that I am going to resist a temptation to fisk it. The temptation isn’t that great, anyway. It just doesn’t deserve the time that a fisking would take. A central aspect of Steorts’s “argument” is the dismissal, with a flick of the wrist, of the entire natural law tradition by the magical invocation of the is-ought distinction and the name of David Hume. Really. See for yourself. Gosh, it’s just that simple.

As I was musing on Steorts’s cavalier treatment of natural law and wondering what sort of response might be effective with someone this dismissive, I remembered this post of mine from a few months back. Rather surprisingly, it didn’t get any comments, so here I will try to make the connections to current issues explicitly yet again.