With all this talk about gay marriage, we eventually have to come to the question: Who decides? Who gets to say whether we will have gay marriage or not? And that question eventually becomes, Is it okay for courts to legalize gay marriage if legislatures won’t? Publius over at Obsidian Wings has some interesting thoughts on the matter. He claims ... Read More
I know that Daniel is only trying to soften his blows, but really, I don’t think my argument can be “innocuous” and “unfortunate” at the same time. Come on, tell me what you really think! I can appreciate how it seems that liberals are always in the business of telling people what rights they do and don’t have. But, in ... Read More
Danny B, who thankfully is the first person ever to accuse me of “grotesque confusion” (in those exact terms at least), takes the true libertarian line on gay marriage. Yet the degree to which he grants some pretty questionable conservative assumptions surprises me. I’m not sure exactly what Daniel means by “civil society,” but surely he realizes that the government ... Read More
Marriage isn’t really one of my issues, and as HPR’s libertarian-in-residence (though I’d proudly call myself an American reactionary) the entire gay marriage debacle is not one of my priorities. There are a couple things I’d like to point out in response to the post below, first being the grotesque confusion of liberty and equality that occurs in calling the ... Read More
Over at the Corner, Matthew Franck finds much wisdom in the following teleological view of marriage: “The essential purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. Absent this purpose, we would not need marriage as a distinct social institution.” I responded to him by email, and hope he will respond to me, ... Read More
So apparently McCain’s strategist, Steve Schmidt, is recommending that Republicans drop their rabid opposition to gay marriage. I think the “rabid” part is right; it’s certainly not netting them any votes. Strategically, however, I think it’s wise for them to not just give in entirely; it’s hardly as though there’s a clear majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage, ... Read More
Social issues move off center stage At the 1992 Republican National Convention, conservative media personality Pat Buchanan fired the opening salvos of the ongoing national culture war, declaring, “There is a religious war going on in our country…it is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.” ... Read More
The Democratic Party and California's Proposition 8
A whole slew of conservative (or conservative-ish) writers are taking on the idea of “illiberal liberalism,” by which they mean a liberalism that tries to exclude dogmatic religious communities from respectable public debate, or which puts such restraints on those communities (by, say, forbidding them to use religious justifications for their public-policy preferences) that they are forced to lose what ... Read More
