Saturday, March 07, 2009

Same-Sex Marriage is not Conservative

A recent bit of nonsense from Andrew Sullivan:

If you decouple the notion of "family" from fundamentalist religion, same-sex marriage is revealed as the socially conservative reform it actually is. Wouldn't it be amazing if China got there first?

TranslationL: If you decouple the notion of "family" from conservative, traditional norms, then you can see that modernizing and liberalizing the definition is actually conservative!

I suppose that there are two ways to see this. First, Sullivan thinks that marriage is a traditional, or conservative, institution. Therefore, to expand the institution is to expand conservatism, however much expanding the institution may actually dilute its traditional meaning and thus damage rather than actually expand the institution itself.

Second, Andrew could be basically saying that anythign short of promiscuous bathhouse sex is conservative.

Either way, he is "defining liberalism down," attempting to make liberal ideas appear conservative and shifting the Overton window farther left.

He is not a good conservative.

That is all.

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