The Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Ruling and Going with the Flow

By Published on July 5, 2015

I started the day on Bill Bennett’s radio show, which is always fun. Jonah Goldberg was on before me, and advanced the proposition, after the Supreme Court’s almighty constitutional bender last week, that it wasn’t so bad; conservatives who just pottered around in their own world and tended to their families would still be able to lead lives largely unbattered by the forces of “progress”. A few minutes later, one of Bill’s listeners, Claudine, came on and said that’s what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How’d that work out?

Claudine had the better of the argument, I think. Most of us are not cut out to swim against the tide. For one thing, it’s exhausting. Tides ebb and flow, and it’s easier just to go with it. In Germany, maybe if your very best pal was Jewish, you’d say something. But, if it’s just the greengrocer or the elderly couple in the second-floor flat that you nod to on the stairs, do you really want to make a fuss and have arguments with your family and friends all the time? Isn’t it easier just to say nothing?

In the end, most people want to be like most people. That’s why they tell you the weekend movie grosses on the Monday morning news and put the Top Ten bestsellers at the front of Barnes & Noble – so that you can like what everybody else likes.

So I find the idea that tens of millions of American “traditionalist” conservatives are going to lead their own lives immune to the broader culture somewhat unlikely. Were the same-sex marriage decision, for example, merely a judicial ruling, Barack Obama would not have lit up the White House in LGBT rainbow colors. It is after all “the people’s house” and half the people aren’t entirely on board with this. But he chose to see this not as a mere judge’s ruling but as an ideological victory – and to celebrate it as such. And he’s thereby telling you that this shift is an official one, backed by the state, and state power, and it won’t stop here.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in an actual bit of jurisprudential footnoting in the midst of his Hallmark greeting card on the raptures of gay love, said that organizations would still be free to teach and promote the old form of restrictive straights-only marriage. That’s awfully sporting of him, but the Boy Scouts of America provide a clue as to how it’s likely to work out. In the late Nineties, the BSA said no to gay scoutmasters. I was on the floor of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 2000 when they had some Eagle scouts as an honor guard – and in my section of the crowd everyone booed. And I remember thinking, “Man, these Dems are nuts. Booing boy scouts?”

Read the article “The Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Ruling and Going with the Flow” on steynonline.com.

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