New York Times caption: "A couple after their wedding in San Francisco in 2008." (Robert Galbraith/Reuters)
Of course! San Francisco is your typical American town; whatever is normal there, is normal everywhere. Only a sex pervert could possibly disagree!
By Nicholas Stix
My VDARE colleague, James Fulford, has a tweet from a Julian Sanchez, implying that New York Times spongecon Ross Douthat is a homophobe, because the latter noted the obvious:
Douthat: “But there is also a certain willed naïveté to the idea that the advance of gay marriage is unrelated to any other marital trend. For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side — judges and journalists, celebrities and now finally politicians — pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation.”
Sanchez tweet: “Bizarro [sic] thing about @DouthatNYT's column is that this ‘marriage is all about procreation’ meme had zero cultural footprint before SSM debate”
James balances Sanchez with the truth:
“Of course, every marriage ceremony in every Anglican/Episcopalian church since 1662 has included this line explaining what marriage was about:
‘First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name...’
“The Catholic marriage ceremony has much the same thing, but in different language. One can only assume this guy has never been to normal wedding.”
James titled his blog essay, “Forgetting Western Civilization,” and observed of Sanchez and his ilk,
“That's what happens when you try to start from the Year Zero and forget everything your grandparents knew….
What is Sanchez guilty of? According to James, ignorance. And that’s true. As The Boss would say, he’s a moron-ass. He’s also a militant homosexualist, by which I mean someone seeking to force homosexuality on the American people, regardless of whether he is himself a homosexual.
But is he a liar?
A philosophy professor named Harry Frankfurt would probably say, ‘No, he’s a “bullshitter.”’
Frankfurt once wrote an essay called, “On Bullshit,” which was a response to the attack on objective truth and morality by deconstructivism/postmodernism/whatever (Marxist nihilism). Frankfurt argued that people who care not a whit about the truth, and make false factual claims are not liars, but “bullshitters,” which is likely how he would categorize a Julian Sanchez.
Frankfurt published his essay in book form, and made a small fortune off of it, which is why it is no longer available on the Internet.
Petter Naessan describes Frankfurt’s central distinction thusly:
“Frankfurt makes an important distinction between lying and bullshitting. Both the liar and the bullshitter try to get away with something. But ‘lying’ is perceived to be a conscious act of deception, whereas ‘bullshitting’ is unconnected to a concern for truth. Frankfurt regards this ‘indifference to how things really are’, as the essence of bullshit. Furthermore, a lie is necessarily false, but bullshit is not – bullshit may happen to be correct or incorrect. The crux of the matter is that bullshitters hide their lack of commitment to truth. Since bullshitters ignore truth instead of acknowledging and subverting it, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies.”
To me, this is breaking a butterfly on the wheel, especially the notion that “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies.”
The Frankfurterish “bullshitter” never tells the truth, except by accident, while the “liar” deliberately deceives. But in both cases, their victims are deceived. And since this is a qualitative matter, lacking any objective criterion, one could just as well maintain that “lying is a greater enemy of truth than bullshit.”
But if Harry Frankfurt is going to live with street slang, he’s got to be willing to die with it, too. During my childhood and early adulthood, a “bullshit artist” was a liar. And I strive for simplicity, as all sons of Socrates ought to. And thus, I vote for liar. If you’re going to make factual statements without any regard as to their truthfulness, you’re a liar.
Now, let’s look at Ross Douthat, the spongecon who is an official “conservative” columnist at the New York Times, whose communist publisher, Pinch Sulzberger Jr., said 20 years ago that “diversity” was the newspaper’s most important goal, and several years ago became America’s most powerful advocate of same-sex “marriage.”
Douthat clearly understands that he is to take a fall, because he takes himself out of the fight in the first round. He refers to Andrew Sullivan as a “conservative,” doesn’t mention that Sullivan was already then a homosexualist activist, and completely misrepresents reality, to make it seem that the public supports this abomination.
“Half a generation later, Sullivan’s view has carried the day almost completely. The conservative argument still has serious exponents, but it’s now chuckled at in courtrooms, dismissed by intellectuals, mocked in the media and (in a sudden, recent rush) abandoned by politicians. Indeed, it has been abandoned by Frum himself, who is now energetically urging Republicans to embrace the redefinition of marriage he once warned against.”
[So, the elites support same-sex “marriage,” but the people don’t. What this is about is the elites’ war on the people.]
“Yet for an argument that has persuaded so few [lie!], the conservative view has actually had decent predictive power.”
The first 31 states that had votes on same-sex “marriage” voted it down. Last November, this movement enjoyed its first four victories, but that was after years of pollyganda, of the MSM refusing to report on opposition, silencing opposition voices in letters and comments, telling the public that this change was inevitable, that only vicious bigots supported it, and after the betrayal of the Republican Party, which surrendered, just as it has surrendered on every issue of importance to its base.
By the way, no comments in opposition to same-sex “marriage” appear after Douthat’s column until #116, and that one is so muted that you could be forgiven for missing it, as is the other opposition comment. If you believe that that was an honest expression of readers’ beliefs (98.6 percent in favor of gay “marriage”), I have a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge.
What do you call editors who silence supporters of the majority side of a debate, in order to make it look as if the latter enjoy no public support?
Note that, as I said in my headline, a method is clearly being used here, and it is the identical method being used to ram through a nation-breaking mass amnesty of tens of millions of racist, irredentist, parasitic, illegal alien invaders.
This is one of the ways that totalitarianism is being imposed on the American people. Note that I did not qualify my foregoing comment with “soft.” There is no “soft totalitarianism.”
[A tip ‘o the hate to my VDARE colleague, Steve Sailer.]
By Ross Douthat
Published: March 30, 2013 140 Comments
New York Times
"We’re seeing a revolution with wider ripples than its supporters admit."
IN 1997, two prominent conservative writers, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan, debated same-sex marriage for the online magazine Slate. [N.S.: Sullivan was never a “conservative.” And why doesn’t Douthat note that Sullivan was already openly homosexual?]
Frum defended what was then the consensus conservative (and consensus national) position. [It still is.] Redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, he argued, would explicitly sever the institution’s connection to the two interrelated realities, gender difference and procreation, that it had evolved to address. In so doing, it would replace a traditional view of matrimony with a broader, thinner, more adult-centric view, which would ultimately be less likely to bind parents to children, husbands to wives.
“Proponents of gay marriage can only get what they want,” Frum wrote, “by weakening Americans’ attachment to the traditional family even more than it has already been weakened,” and speeding the “process of social dissolution” that the 1960s and 1970s began.
Sullivan countered that the “process” Frum feared was simply an established fact. Heterosexuals had already severed marriage from procreation and permanence, and so there was no more reason to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses than to deny them to the infertile and elderly. Indeed, far from being radical, gay marriage was more likely to be stabilizing, “sending a message about matrimonial responsibility and mutual caring” to gays and straights alike.
[Ridic.]
Half a generation later, Sullivan’s view has carried the day almost completely. [If that is so, then how come every time a state has had a plebiscite on same-sex “marriage,” the people have rejected it?] The conservative argument still has serious exponents, but it’s now chuckled at in courtrooms, dismissed by intellectuals, mocked in the media and (in a sudden, recent rush) abandoned by politicians. Indeed, it has been abandoned by Frum himself, who is now energetically urging Republicans to embrace the redefinition of marriage he once warned against.
[So, the elites support same-sex “marriage,” but the people don’t.]
Yet for an argument that has persuaded so few [lie!], the conservative view has actually had decent predictive power. As the cause of gay marriage has pressed forward, the social link between marriage and childbearing has indeed weakened faster than before. As the public’s shift on the issue has accelerated, so has marriage’s overall decline.
Since Frum warned that gay marriage could advance only at traditional wedlock’s expense, the marriage rate has been falling faster, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has been rising faster, and the substitution of cohabitation for marriage has markedly increased. Underlying these trends is a steady shift in values: Americans are less likely to see children as important to marriage and less likely to see marriage as important to childbearing (the generation gap on gay marriage shows up on unwed parenting as well) than even in the very recent past.
Correlations do not, of course, establish causation. The economy is obviously playing a leading role in the retreat from marriage — the shocks of recession, the stagnation of wages, the bleak prospects of blue-collar men. Culturally, what matters most is the emergence of what the National Marriage Project calls a “capstone” understanding of marriage, which treats wedlock less as a foundation for adulthood and more as a celebration of adult achievement — and which seems to work out far better for our disciplined upper class than for society as a whole.
But there is also a certain willed naïveté to the idea that the advance of gay marriage is unrelated to any other marital trend. For 10 years, America’s only major public debate about marriage and family has featured one side — judges and journalists, celebrities and now finally politicians — pressing the case that modern marriage has nothing to do with the way human beings reproduce themselves, that the procreative understanding of the institution was founded entirely on prejudice, and that the shift away from a male-female marital ideal is analogous to the end of segregation.
Now that this argument seems on its way to victory, is it really plausible that it has changed how Americans view gay relationships while leaving all other ideas about matrimony untouched?
You can tell this naïveté is willed because it’s selective. There are plenty of interesting arguments, often from gay writers, about how the march to gay marriage might be influencing heterosexual norms — from Alex Ross’s recent musings in The New Yorker on the sudden “queer vibe” in straight pop culture to Dan Savage’s famous argument that straights might do well to imitate the “monogamish” norms of some gay male couples. It’s only the claim that this influence might not always be positive that is dismissed as bigotry and unreason.
A more honest, less triumphalist case for gay marriage would be willing to concede that, yes, there might be some social costs to redefining marriage. It would simply argue that those costs are too diffuse and hard to quantify to outweigh the immediate benefits of recognizing gay couples’ love and commitment.
Such honesty would make social liberals more magnanimous in what looks increasingly like victory, and less likely to hound and harass religious institutions that still want to elevate and defend the older marital ideal.
But whether people think they’re on the side of God or of History, magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT.
1 comment:
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