I thought this thoughtful. Anyone who has watched this non-debate must, regardless of their views on the actual topic, be impressed and discomfited by the sheer weight of conformist violence which has been levied against anyone still articulating views which were commonplace 10 years ago.
And we must wonder where this abstract war against the very real existence of penises and vaginas is leading. As I have asked repeatedly: what virtue inheres in denigrating the obvious fact that women and men differ in their biology and social expressions, even if the range of possibilities on both sides is wide?
It is my view that we are born wired with a “difference maker”, a tribal instinct. And this instinct, far from being extinguished in egalitarian projects, is in fact inflamed and made all the more vicious for its very intellectual and moral vacuousness.
Leftism results in extreme violence precisely BECAUSE of the intellectual sophistry underlying its claims. People become MORE violent the weaker their claims to injustice.
One must always, in the end at least, and preferably in the beginning, ask what the purpose is. What is the purpose of life? Where do we want to go as a nation, and as a people?
I would argue that the real oppression of gays is not the existence of laws regulating the words they can use to describe their relationships, but rather in their very existence in a society which has renounced the use of reason, capitulated in its quest to find enduring meaning in life, and all but abandoned the conforming masses to the beliefs that human souls are a fantasy, that human life ends in biological decay, and that all our work means nothing.
As I have often said, the colors of autumn signal not new life, but new decay, and all the supposed efflorescence of this new reality–that of using the Bill of Rights to confer a right which appears nowhere within it–is in fact a signal of cultural loss and decline.
As has become customary for those seeking to avoid the censure of the reflexive, I will admit candidly I don’t care whether or not gays can marry, because it doesn’t affect me. Every gay within ten miles of me could be married and I wouldn’t know it. It is the larger realities which alone concern me. It is the tone, and the lack of intellectual principle–of genuine Liberality–which concerns me.
And at the end of the day, I think my principal concern even with gays is that this whole project is making it HARDER to answer the question “who am I”?, not easier. If everyone and everything is equal to everyone and everything else, the loss of the ego is assured. As they say implicitly in this interesting article, it is in important respects better to be “oppressed” that fully integrated: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/scotus-same-sex-marriage-gay-culture.html?_r=0
What I want more than anything is a return to–or first general use of, depending on your reading of history–the use of negotiation to resolve difference. There is a profound difference between eradicating alterity, and accepting it. The first is the egalitarian impulse, and it leads to existential angst and unhappiness. The latter is the basis of genuine Liberalism and the persistence of meaning.