Unfogged compares the gay marriage issue to one of my favorite objects of analogy: indie-rock snobbery. When your favorite band becomes popular, and all the teenyboppers like it, you feel that they’ve sold out. When marriage becomes popular, and all the queers start liking it, you feel that marriage is sullied, even though your relationship isn’t any different.
Now, reasonable people like my friend Mark say to me “I don’t get it. My marriage doesn’t need to be defended against anything. I’m married to a woman, she’s married to me, and how does anyone else’s marriage threaten that?” But we’re not dealing with reasonable people, now are we?
Slate suggests that the serious political strategy is not just to say “fair’s fair” or harp on the church/state issue, as I have been saying, but to promote marriage, and make it open to everyone. Say “we like marriage, marriage is the foundation of a stable society, let people get married. What, you’re opposed to stable relationships? You’re opposed to families?” But that slides perilously close to the stand-up comic’s line: “since people’s sex lives dry up after marriage (so goes the conventional wisdom), the right should support gay marriage, because you’ll end up with lots of sexless gay couples watching TV at night.” Har har har.
I still like my libertarian/economic rationale (‘deregulate the bridal industry’). Not because it’s serious– that might be a side-effect but it’s not a really good reason for supporting marriage. No, I repeat myself about this because I hope that it drives a point home: there’s a significant split between the ‘small-government’ right and the ‘religious-government’ right, which are unified only by dislike of the Democrats.
If the Dems can position themselves as the party of sensible commerce (Free trade, fairly!) and sensible morals (tricky– but remember Jesus was a liberal), they’ll be able to grab some moderate votes. More importantly, they’ll increase infighting in the GOP, which will give it less of a “coherent policy” image and more of a “disaster waiting to happen” image.
Secretly Ironic 