What is it about gay marriage that makes it look to some conservatives like a zero-sum game? In what way is a traditional heterosexual couple with a traditional religious marriage any less married if a gay couple can get a certificate at City Hall? I don’t see how the parallels to abolishing private property or religious institutions — which are zero-sum — would hold.

The parallel that gay marriage proponents cite is the distinction that exists today, but didn’t always, between birth certificates and baptism certificates. A religious institution can discriminate any way it wants in recognizing a new member of its faith community. The state records the fact of birth without discrimination. This one doesn’t hold perfectly either, being closer to the civil union compromise that no one seems to like.

Do you know what “Queer Nation” types call the people working on the gay marriage issue? Gay Republicans. They understand that it represents an attempt to participate in a profoundly conservative institution, rejecting bathhouse promiscuity, rejecting in-your-face lifestyle flaunting — almost a surrender in the culture war.

Frum again shows himself a pretentious twit, in addition to being no conservative.

“This is a book with which everyone on both sides of the issue will have to engage…”

In the first place, how does one engage a book? I thought one read them. In my lexicon, engaging is about agreeing to be married or closing with and destroying the enemy, depending on the context.

In the second, I don’t know why confirmed opponents, especially on religious grounds, of dignifying homosexual liaisons with the name of marriage must read, if that is what Frum means, Rauch’s book. If we are the masters of our arguments in defense of marriage properly understood, we don’t need to waste our time parsing the meaningless nuances of the enemy. Our arguments are unchanged by their sophistry.

Not for the first time, I find myself wishing Frum would go home to Canada and leave my country alone. When he does, I hope he will take Rauch with him. HRS

I must disagree with Mr. Hechtman. This is a zero-sum game of sorts.

We are fighting to preserve an ancient institution. It, and all that it represents for social health and cohesion, can only be weakened by allowing perversion to steal its name (and enjoy the benefits society confers on marriage as a result).

The homosexualist push to misappropriate marriage is not about homosexuals trying to become inverted versions of normal married couples. It is about gaining recognition and legitimacy for conduct that the overwhelming majority of all people in every known society have known is harmful, even evil.

Homosexual “marriage” is camouflage for sodomy and buggery. The homosexualists seek to conform society to their sadly destructive way of life, not to conform themselves in any way to society’s norms. That is what the fight is about, and that is why accommodation is surrender. HRS

Left-liberals want to boil the frog quickly. Right-liberals (like Frum) want to boil it more slowly. Left-liberals want to take the world by storm, and conquer it immediately for the free and equal new superman. Right-liberals want to take the world slowly, by dancing the Hegelian Mambo.

The key thing that keeps liberalism alive is so-called “conservatism”.

Matt writes:

“The key thing that keeps liberalism alive is so-called ‘conservatism.’”

I agree of course. The left and the right are the two wings of liberalism, it needs both wings to fly. But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. How would we respond to the argument that without soft-conservatism or right-liberalism, the real right, which we believe in, would not have been strong enough to stop the left, and that the left would therefore have advanced even faster in America, just as it did in Europe, where there is no organized, mainstream “conservatism” to oppose the left?

I don’t know the answer to Mr. Auster’s question, but one thought that comes to mind is that right-liberalism posing as conservatism has sapped the strength and drained much potential support of true conservatism by providing an easier (and more acceptable to our zeitgeist) alternative. HRS

I would respond to Mr. Auster’s question as follows. Appeasement as a policy always ends in disaster. Appeasing the left-liberal by abandoning principle creates what we see as the right-liberal. Appeasement occurs because of a lack of will, which can be caused by excessive fear of the unknown and an unwillingness to sacrifice. Habitual appeasers need a lot of motivation to resist aggression.

Many conservatives are habitual appeasers and have gained power only after being motivated by serving under an awful left-liberal government. The left liberals were given total control of the country during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The country rejected left-liberal control by huge margins because it saw what being ruled by liberals means. In both cases, there was a visible distinction between conservatism and liberalism. Reagan could be viewed as coming along too soon; that is, he came before Carter sank the country so deep that the Congress and the Presidency could have been taken over by conservatives 20-24 years ago.

Clinton and Congress performed so poorly the Congress was finally lost by the left-liberals. One man, the leader of the conservatives, Newt Gingrich, then unilaterally gave control back to Clinton and the left-liberals in Congress. He did this by caving in while the left-liberal controlled institutions were being shut down over the budget battle. Gingrich is a tactician not a grand strategist, or maybe he just did not have the character to take a big risk.

So it seems reasonable to consider refusing, as a general rule, to abandon principle. Refusing to abandon principle means refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils: left-liberal and right-evil. Consider risking significant short-term losses for long-term gain.

Would liberalism today be more than a local force in America and in Europe if American conservatives had not spent most of their capital on fighting communist Russia? We will never know because conservatives never insisted liberals get out of the cart and help pull. I know this is big, tough talk. I’ll admit I don’t know whether I have what it takes to sacrifice much, but I do know I have long been fed up with appeasing.

Last June Frum made the remarkable argument that legitimating same-sex couplings with marriage could “even lead to” the overturning of maternal preference in custody. Little did he know that maternal preference itself was the “gay marriage” of a century ago, and blazed the trail to the sex jungle we’re in now.

This is one thing the Arabs understand better than we— children belong with their fathers.

In answer to Mr. Hechtman’s question, the danger is that marriage becomes “no big deal”. This has been happening because of cohabitation, and gay “marriage” is another step in that direction. Stanley Kurtz has written in depth about the erosion of respect for marriage that has followed various forms of gay “marriage” in Scandinavia. Even AFTER cohabitation became an accepted norm in Sweden, gay marriage led to a measurably significant FURTHER erosion of respect for marriage. See http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz.asp for the latest on this.

Mr. Hechtman asks:

“What is it about gay marriage that makes it look to some conservatives like a zero-sum game? In what way is a traditional heterosexual couple with a traditional religious marriage any less married if a gay couple can get a certificate at City Hall?”

The basic assumption of liberals is that all the goods of civilization, such as the institution of marriage, are automatic, and that the only political problem is how to distribute them equally. They are like rocks or stars, things that will always be there regardless of what we do. But as conservative social scientists have pointed out, marriage is difficult, for example it goes against men’s natural desire for sexual freedom, and so it needs a great deal of support from the society in order to thrive. One of these supports is the experience that marriage is something larger and higher than the individuals that constitute each marriage. Of course, that is weakened today, with easy divorce and so on, but the ideal is still real and operative, and it’s what still keeps our society good and decent to the extent to that it is good and decent. Same-sex “marriage” transforms the meaning of marriage into a mere arrangement for the satisfaction of the emotional and other needs of the participants. Just listen to the rhetoric of the homosexual marriage proponents—it’s all about getting their “rights,” about getting “recognition” as equals, about perks such as insurance compensation, and so on. Same-sex marriage, by including homosexual relationships within marriage on an equal basis with normal sexual relationships would radically devalue marriage as an institution, and since marriage is the central formative institution of society, it would destroy society in concrete and devastating ways.

Here’s one small, or not so small, example of how radically same-sex marriage would change things: the words “husband” and “wife” would no longer be usable, since those words would exclude same-sex couples. Everyone would have to adopt some generic term that can be equally shared by all marriage couples, such as “partner.” So there’s a concrete illustration of how heterosexual marriages would be _directly_ harmed by homosexual marriage.

These arguments cannot be understood by egalitarians, because for them there is no truth except for the simplistic demand for ever greater equality and “rights.” They do not understand or appreciate the complex realities on which society rests.

I wrote:

“The basic assumption of liberals is that all the goods of civilization, such as the institution of marriage, are automatic, and that the only political problem is how to distribute them equally. They are like rocks or stars, things that will always be there regardless of what we do.”

This by the way explains the basic leftist psychology seen among both American liberals and foreigners: they see America as a combination of Santa Claus and Satan: Santa Claus, because (they believe) America is the effortless source of all goods and goodies; and Satan, because (they believe) America is meanspiritedly and arbitrarily withholding those goods and goodies from them.

If this is part of an attack on marriage and the family in general, while we are asked to celebrate the diversity of customs, including the subhuman breeding practices of the alternative-welfare populations; more should be said. If officials, in the name of equalization, have respected the seventy-odd percent illegitimacy rate of the blacks in this country (for example), as if these were human breeding practices, is this what they want to push everyone else down to? Hatred against humanity could motivate such policies, but concern for uplifting the weak can’t possibly be involved. If it could, how could officials (and so many scholars, who are in a position to insult any constituency) want children to be raised in the subhuman setting of normative illegitimacy?

The legal briar patch of “gay marriage” grows thicker as a Vermont “civil union” gay couple goes through a contested “divorce” of their civil union in court in the state of New York, where they now reside: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/powell200405100900.asp

Were these Vermondykes aware when they moved next door that the “York State” (as real, old-time Green Mountain men call the place) still has the toughest divorce laws in the land? What better place to expose the triviality of the whole concept?

Almost no one is making the best argument of all against same-sex pseudomarriage, namely that it does NOT MATTER if the couple breaks up. So why waste public resources keeping them together?

This calls to mind Marx’s only useful distinction: Among straights, divorce, adultery, promiscuity, epidemics, etc., constitute tragedy. Among homos, they repeat as farce.