Where Will Gay Marriage Take Us?
Stanley Kurtz knows---he's studied the countries where it exists today.
Pt II is here.
That's nowhere America should go.
Pt II is here.
That's nowhere America should go.
posted by Teflon at 7:51 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Like this?
http://volokh.com/posts/1162396316.shtml
Thogek-
It is always dangerous to be on the other side of Eugene Volokh, but I think Kurtz has the better analysis.
Of course, people ought to review both cases and make up their own minds.
Thanks for providing the link.
Kurtz frankly is fear-mongering.
As I posted this afternoon in Polyamory in the News ( http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com ), the key to understanding this mindset is the "scarcity model" of marriage, freedom, and human worth in general. In the scarcity model, it's a zero-sum game: for someone to gain value, someone else must lose value. In particular, the validity and worth of a traditional family depends on keeping other kinds of families from having validity and worth. Because if someone new gains validity and worth, someone else has to lose them.
The key fear driving conservatives here — "legalize gay marriage, followed by multi-partner marriage, and pretty soon the whole idea of marriage will be meaningless" (as Kurtz put it in an earlier article) — stems from a core assumption that many conservatives hold: "If everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody."
This quip began as a snappy comeback to Jesse Jackson leading chants of "I am somebody" among his ghetto constituents. Quite a lot of conservatism is based (either unconsciously or overtly) on the feudal-system assumption that your validity depends on a lesser class of people being denied validity.
Seen from this angle, the validity of your marriage *really does* depend on "undesirable" classes of people being denied marriage. And letting them marry *really will* invalidate the meaning of your own marriage!
Unless, that is, you adopt another, better, post-feudal idea, one that modern conservatives ought to recognize: "My freedom is not diminished by your freedom."
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