
Or, “Why I can’t respect the opinions of 30% of this country”
Salon (which has turned into the poor man’s Slate, if you ask me) has a new column called “Ask The Wingnut,” where a conservative political whatever who used to whatever for W. (Waterboard? Seriously, Salon doesn’t explain what he did.) answers questions.
The last question asked was about whether or not conservatives truly think gay marriage will bring down the fabric of society.
The answer he gave was shockingly honest: yes, they do. And he does too. Because he has “yet to see a convincing argument that the effort to force gay marriage on the nation is effectively divorced from the effort to force people to change their views on homosexuality.”
Wow. “Force gay marriage” is right up there with “pro-abortion movement.” Neither exist. No one’s forcing anything. It’s a simple human rights issue that’s clear to any one who isn’t a bigot, but as this guy responds: “the opposition to gay marriage is not motivated, as a general rule, in large part or small, by bigotry.”
He cites an example: “There is precedent for this, as in the way Henry VIII threatened the churches in England after his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. And there are real-world examples from today, such as the case of a Christian photographer who was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney’s costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple’s commitment ceremony.”
That may be a personal choice of the photographer, but it’s also discrimination based on a person’s biological makeup. Would it be just as okay to refuse to photograph a black person’s wedding?
So, as it stands, the conservative movement doesn’t understand it’s own bigotry. But here’s the thing: they don’t even understand their own politics.
Conservatives ultimately value liberty and lack of government intervention in their lives. Ultimately, that means conservatives should embrace people’s individual liberty to have an abortion or get gay-married. Pushing for anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage laws and amendments is government intervention, though they tend to argue that legalizing gay marriage and allowing abortion to stand is the government intervention. It wouldn’t have to be, if they didn’t create the uproar themselves.
So the truth is, the Republican party isn’t a conservative party anymore. We already know W. presided over one of the most careless spending binges ever.
With the Internet, we’ve had a large upsurge in Libertarian political organization: just look at Ron Paul’s grassroots campaigning. The new conservative movement should be a divorced-from-the-Republicans Libertarian movement, led by the ghost of William F. Buckley. But that’s not going to happen. A loose affiliation of tax-haters (and, apparently, people who don’t understand the correlation with taxes and their application to the educational system and roads) has created the abominable Republican party, and it’s time we kill it’s wounded corpse.
Gay rights could be the galvanizing issue here.
Because, if you will read the entire article linked below, I’m not sure this guy really is opposed to gay marriage like he thinks he is, but he knows the answer he’s supposed to give to manipulate the religious-right in our country, and he’s ready to spew it forth. Let’s do him a favor and spit it back in his face.
The Wingnut explains why conservatives fear gay marriage | Salon.