Jonathan Rauch has some smart things to say about why the California anti-same-sex marriage proposition passed, as have almost all the other similar propositions in any state where they have been put to a vote by the people.
In sum: The court system is a bad way to proceed here. And make an argument that respects your opponents' disagreement rather than calling them names.
Many people in the progressive and gay worlds live in a post-modern neighborhood, where nothing is fixed and everything is what you make of it. You can change your gender, for example, and go from being a boy to a girl if you want...even if you don't get the surgery!* I once worked in a place where the house Latina Lesbian everyone knew was an Italian girl with a boyfriend. But her choice of identity was publicly sacrosanct.
Trouble is, most humans live in another world, where things have natures, as they always have. A boy is not a girl. Real men do not have sex with other men. And marriage is something men and women do.
If you want to change their minds, court orders and name-calling seem pretty thin weapons against the archetypal drift.
*Although, as I have pointed out with some wonderment, you can't change your race.
Part of what confuses this old fella is that it is not uncommon now to hear that race is a fiction, but on the other hand that racisms is the original sin, and yet again that there is no way you can change your race, although you can change your gender, that being mere social construction.
____________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment