Beck and same-sex “marriage”

This had escaped my attention until this week. Glenn Beck, in addition to making Martin Luther King his symbol of everything that is right and good, has no problem with homosexual “marriage.” The below exchange is from the August 11 edition of The O’Reilly Factor. (The linked page has a video). After dancing around the issue for a while, Beck comes out and states his position clearly:

O’REILLY: Do you believe—do you believe that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?

BECK: A threat to the country?

O’REILLY: Yeah, it going to harm the country?

BECK: No, I don’t. Will the gays come and get us?

O’REILLY: OK. Is it going to harm the country in any way?

BECK: I believe—I believe what Thomas Jefferson said. If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?

O’REILLY: OK, so you don’t. That’s interesting. Because I don’t think a lot of people understand that about you.

BECK: As long as we—as long as we are not going down the road of Canada, where it now is a problem for churches to have free speech. If they can still say, hey, we—

O’REILLY: Oppose it—

BECK:—we oppose it—

O’REILLY: Right.

BECK:—but we’re not trying to kill anybody or trying to—

O’REILLY: In Sweden they have that too. OK, so gay marriage to you, not a big a threat to the nation.

Bottom line: a person who has no problem with the most radical social innovation in the history of mankind is, by definition, not a conservative.

Uh oh! There’s that autocrat Auster again, declaring who is and who is not a conservative! How dare he!

Well, I’m sorry, folks, but it’s not I who am declaring that Beck is not a conservative, it’s reality that is doing that. Words have meanings. Yes, all words and definitions have grey areas. But at a certain spot the grey area ends and there is a bright red line. A person who does not oppose the reconstruction of the most fundamental human institution for the sake of making homosexual couples equal to heterosexual couples is, by definition, not a conservative, any more than a person who does not oppose socialism is, by definition, not a conservative.

Beck’s arguments are, in fact, standard libertarian. He has no notion of the social good or of a social order and of how it is threatened by homosexual marriage. All he knows is himself. Since homosexual marriage won’t affect him in any immediate way, he has no problem with it.

And by the way, there is a Greek word for a person who knows only about himself and cares about himself: idiot.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 26, 2010 01:47 PM | Send