Curse you, Adam Corolla! As my faithful readers know (thank you, both of you!) I generally only weigh in on topics where I can find an angle that somebody smarter than me hasn’t already written. This is another one of those ideas that I’d been kicking around for a while but never got around to writing, and Mr. Corolla beat me to the punch. In a recent podcast he pointed out that Gay Marriage is hardly an end point to the debate:
“It’ll be legalized, hopefully, and then you’ll think we’ll be done with it, and then they’ll say, ‘we want to get married at the Crystal Cathedral,'” Carolla said on a recent podcast. “And the guys at the Crystal Cathedral will go ‘no, we don’t agree with it, and according to our faith, a man doesn’t lie down with another man, and a chick who looks like a man doesn’t lay down with another human who drives a Subaru. We don’t condone this.’ There’s a gonna be a march, and then there’s gonna be a thing and it’s gonna go to the Supreme Court again. This much I know … there will be more fighting. it will continue.”
I raised the incrementalism argument when I wrote about this subject last summer, and now with the subject becoming bigger in the news I’m seeing more of the incrementalism that conservatives are rightly concerned about. Here was my take:
Gay marriage was a subject I had never really had an opinion about until around twelve years ago when I read Jesse Ventura’s first book, “Do I Stand Alone?” Mind you, back in 2000 Jesse was still a new governor in Minnesota and a breath of fresh air in the system, not the full time conspiracy theorist he’s become today. On the issue of gay marriage he looked at both sides, and his assertion was that it was wrong to discriminate against two consenting adults from legal benefits from a system that they have paid taxes into based on their gender preference. On the other side, the term “Marriage” has an important spiritual meaning in religions practiced by many Americans, and their views should be respected as well. His solution was civil unions – granting legal rights for gay couples while still respecting the people whose religious views would be offended.
This seems like a reasonable compromise for both sides, and one that I supported then and still continue to do so. In fact, contrary to the leftist notion that conservatives are opposed to “gay rights” polls show that the majority of Conservatives as well as Republicans support civil unions.
Now, this was an opinion that I adopted thirteen years ago, and it still is my opinion today. But look at how the public perception, and particularly in the mass media has “evolved” since that time. Back in 2000 my stance would be considered moderate to somewhat left of center1 in most quarters, depending on the person I’m standing next to. But today? The fact that I don’t wholeheartedly support “Marriage Equality“, or whatever the latest term is to make the leftist position sound centrist makes me some bigoted extremist who is probably ready to throw a white sheet over his head and burn rainbow painted crosses on Harvey Milk’s grave. I go into my arguments in a lot more depth at my link, but while I haven’t changed, the left certainly has. Each step where leftist thought is met “halfway” (or anywhere) automatically becomes the new center to them, and anything to the right of that new line is right wing extremism.
I laid out before two of my concerns as to how we’re already seeing negative impacts of recognizing gay marriage –forcing gay marriage to be taught in schools, as opposed to trivialities like reading and writing, and in preventing children in foster homes from getting placed with families.
When conservatives raise the flag of what will be next down the road, such as redefining marriage for multiple partners, the left just tut-tuts about how they’re overreacting, just as they did when gay marriage was mentioned back in 2000. The problem is that California has already considered polygamy. Jeremy Irons also raised the touchy subject of this possibly leading to incestuous unions, which gets the same chuckle and a head shake reaction. But I ask, why not? Can someone from the left tell me where this issue will be 5-10 years from now? Does this end with “Marriage Equality”? or whatever you’re telling us is now the new center? I look at how our schools are infantilizing our kids today – suspensions for chewing a cookie shaped like a gun, or as a friend whose son is in the Maryland public school system recently told me, the horror of a teacher using a lighter for a science experiment resulted in notes being sent to all of the parents whose kids might have been traumatized by the event. When Baby Bob starts out in school if he calls another kid on the playground “gay”2 is he going to be forced into a modern leftist re-education camp known as “sensitivity training?” And as his parents, will Sister Babe and I also be held accountable for this vile hate speech coming from our child? Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but look at what’s happening up in Canada:
The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval. Very quickly, traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will be penned up within church sanctuaries, and “faith-based” ancillary institutions will be crowbarred into submission. What’s that? I’m “scaremongering”? Well, it’s now routine in Canada, where Catholic schools in Ontario are obligated by law to set up Gay-Straight Alliance groups, where a Knights of Columbus hall in British Columbia was forced to pay compensation for declining a lesbian wedding reception, and where the Rev. Stephen Boisson wrote to his local paper, objecting to various aspects of “the homosexual agenda” and was given a lifetime speech ban by the Alberta “Human Rights” Tribunal ordering him never to utter anything “disparaging” about homosexuals ever again, even in private. Although his conviction was eventually overturned by the Court of Queen’s Bench after a mere seven-and-a-half years of costly legal battles, no Canadian newspaper would ever publish such a letter today. The words of Chief Justice Burger would now attract a hate-crime prosecution in Canada, as the Supreme Court in Ottawa confirmed only last month.
Of course, if you belong to certain approved identity groups, none of this will make any difference. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who famously observed that Africans of the ancient world had made more contributions to philosophy and mathematics than all “them Greek homos,” need not zip his lips – any more than Dr. Bilal Philips, the Toronto Islamic scholar who argues that homosexuals should be put to death, need fear the attention of Canada’s “human rights” commissions. But for the generality of the population this will be one more subject around which one has to tiptoe on ever-thinner eggshells.
And back to Adam Corolla’s original point, at what point does any church that refuses to perform a gay marriage ceremony get labeled a “Hate Group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center? Leftists like to claim that their goal is to have the state out of the business of marriage. While I think many of them actually believe that, I also think that the ultimate goal is the opposite – to get the church out of the business of marriage. Many leftists follow different religious faiths to various degrees, but at the end of the day Leftism is their one true God that will have no other Gods before it.
So my question to all of the gay marriage proponents today is this: If I adopt your position today and accept it as the new center how are you going to “evolve” over the next decade to turn anyone holding your opinion today into hateful right wing bigotry? Will we see any clergy on college campuses who don’t endorse gay marriage attacked in the same manner that’s happening at George Washington University today? Will Polygamy be perfectly acceptable as the recent article in The Economist argues? Scroll down to the comments if you want to start reading some ideas that are just downright creepy. I’ll be curious to see where the leftist feminist groups will weigh in over the practice of polygamy that is so harmful to women. Or do we start normalizing pedophilia in the name of tolerance?
Do my last few ideas sound over the top and kind of crazy? I’ll be the first to admit that they do, but a decade ago I would have said the same about today’s debate. I like to be proactive, so assuming I give in and surrender to this new normal, I have one question for all of you leftists reading this. Can I just get a heads up as to why you’re going to hate me again a decade from now?
1. For my more conservative readers, I’ve lived in the DC area since 1999. If my civil unions idea seems radical leftist to you keep in mind in this town everyone half a step to the right of Michael Moore thinks their views are mainstream and moderate.
2. And no, we’re not going to be encouraging Baby Bob to call anyone gay or any other forms of name calling. From what I hear this is still a favored taunt used by little kids on the playground, and I’m guessing if gay becomes an outlawed term kids will find other colorful insults to hurl at one another.
