Sunday, February 21, 2010

Letters I will never send, #4

Dear social conservatives , including those inclined to boo my friend Alex McCobin at CPAC:

Please read Jason Kuznicki's post "Hardly A Life to Be Lived" regarding gays and conservatism over at Positive Liberty sometime. It would be good if you could offer a better response to the questions that he's posing than Maggie Gallagher did. I am much more likely to start listening to you if you could.

In a related vein, please also read this excellent article about Tom Palmer's role in the 2nd amendment litigation, which contains the very good sentence "And it would have been one of those modestly ironic moments if my colleague might have been murdered in a gay bashing, when he was straight."

1 comment:

  1. I've often wondered something a bit like the second post you link to - would a social conservative want his own (presumed hetero) child married to someone gay 'but struggling with it'? And if there are going to be gay people regardless, wouldn't a social conservative prefer them paired off than promiscuous?

    But reading that post made me think the answer's actually much simpler. Social conservatives basically do want to return to the 1950s (or more accurately, the Unspecified Golden Age), and their advice to someone gay, if they were being a bit more articulate, would be that these are feelings that should be struggled with, that they fall outside the realm of decent behavior, etc., etc. Which is essentially how the stricter religions deal with homosexuality regardless.

    The problem for social conservatives is that stable same-sex relationships are no longer outside the realm of what much of the country sees as decent behavior. But it's not as though 100% of the country's convinced, so I guess their answer would be to keep pretending like it's not 2010 on this issue, to speak in hushed tones about the 'friend' of partnered gay relatives, and wait it out.

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