An intellectual lightweight for homosexual “marriage”

As an example of the insane so-called reality in which we live, here is an item by Michael Goodwin from the June 15 New York Post, in which this thoughtless individual, who says he formerly opposed homosexual “marriage” on traditional grounds, announces that he now supports it. Observe Goodwin’s “reasoning” process.

(As further evidence of this political columnist’s deep considering mind, he voted for Obama in 2008, because, as he has said, he thought Obama was a “moderate,” but after Obama became president he discovered to his shock—his shock—that Obama was a leftist and he turned against him.)

New York is Overdue to Say ‘I Do’ to Gay Marriage

With Albany moving toward a vote on gay marriage, there is an obvious and easy argument in favor: time. In less than a generation, a topic with narrow backing has earned solid majority support and deserves to become the law of New York.

It is a remarkable development. A mere three years ago, liberals like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama navigated the issue during the presidential campaign by declaring support for civil unions.

That seemed a smart compromise at the time, but already, it looks like an out-of-date waffle. So, too, does Obama’s push to allow gays to serve openly in the military while opposing gay marriage. Such is the unsmooth evolution of an idea.

My own concerns about tradition have been overtaken by the blunt simplicity of the proposition, as well as a growing distrust of government. If two consenting adults in love want to commit to each other legally, why should bureaucrats be allowed to stop them? They shouldn’t be, with some common-sense exceptions, such as incest and diminished mental capacity.

The sum total of human liberty grows any time a single individual enjoys expanded freedom. So much the better when rights grow through popular consensus, as is likely with bipartisan legislative approval in Albany, rather than through activist judges.

The same principle, by the way, demands that religious institutions not be forced to perform marriages they don’t sanction. Their liberties, too, must be protected.

Not long ago, skeptics could duck the issue of gay marriage with the quip that gays have suffered enough. Apparently, they haven’t! And so their time has come to experience the pleasure of matrimony.

- end of initial entry -

Alex K. writes:

The range of mainstream political opinion is something like this: A liberal is someone who thinks Obama is a moderate. A conservative is someone who thought Obama was a moderate when he voted for him in 2008, but now realizes he is a liberal.

Kilroy M. writes:

Michael Goodwin “The sum total of human liberty grows any time a single individual enjoys expanded freedom”

I wonder whether I am the only one who sees this statement as idiotic or patently fallacious. There is so much ambiguity in its terms of reference, “freedom” being the most glaring example. On the basis of what exactly does this commentator assess that the “sum total of human liberty” increases with “expanding freedom”? It seems to me this is just another juvenile libertarian obsessed with an abstract idea. My retort is always that the feeling of freedom can only exist in a cultural context (e.g. Western civil society) and that context contains its fair share of traditional limits by way of social taboos and prescriptions. Without them, the very real experience of human dignity would not be possible. In an extreme case, the “freedom” these babies push is just a kind of cultural and moral anarchy (the absence of all traditional constraints) which is the worst possible environment in which to foster liberty.

Posted June 21

Tim W. writes:

There are so many idiocies in Goodwin’s brief column that I can’t touch on them all. But I must comment on his assertion that “bureaucrats” have no business stopping people from marrying, except for certain “common sense” exceptions such as incest or reduced mental capacity. I would have thought that common sense, as it has traditionally been understood, would be enough to stop two people of the same sex from marrying. After all, marriage is by definition a gender specific institution. It exists to bond people of the opposite sex together, not to bond them together regardless of sex.

One would assume that thousands of years of recorded history would confirm that. Until the recent craze of permitting same-sex “marriage” arose, no society in history ever even considered such a thing. Common sense prevailed sufficiently that no one even thought of such nonsense. The current push for same-sex “marriage” isn’t based on common sense but on a juggernaut ideology whose adherents are determined to destroy every positive institution we possess.

But why, might I ask, does Goodwin oppose incestuous marriage? One traditional reason for not permitting them is the potential negative consequences to offspring. But there will be no offspring from homosexual unions. So why can’t brothers “marry?” Perhaps we could continue to ban incestuous marriages between a brother and a young sister, or a father and his twenty-something daughter, but why stop a young man from marrying his post-menopausal mother? Why stop any incestuous same-sex “marriage?” What if the “couple” truly love one another and want to commit? Is Goodwin just incestophobic?

This is the idiocy Goodwin’s “common sense” leads to. Real common sense, based on countless generations of human experience, tells us that incestuous marriage is wrong even if there is no possibility of offspring. Ditto for same-sex “marriage.” But Goodwin’s “common sense,” which is really nothing more than a zeitgeist, tells us no such thing.

James N. writes:

Every time they throw “freedom” at us, we must answer, “freedom to do what?”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2011 05:58 PM | Send