The recent move away from social issues — particularly homosexuality — has enraged and frightened social conservatives, who feel they are being forced to the fringe. World Net Daily columnist David Kupelian articulates this fear and scolds the Tea Party for focusing on economic issues:
In the end, there are only two choices: Either we acknowledge as a society, with love and tolerance, that there is something wrong with homosexuality – as we affirmed for centuries, from the Pilgrims’ time until just recently – or we go into terminal denial and tell each other homosexuality is perfectly normal and healthy. If we go that way, we are denying the core moral lessons not just of Christianity and Judaism, but of common sense, experience, medicine and history.
Once we rip the lid off Pandora’s Box, we can’t control what flies out. No tea party rally, no mid-term election, can put it back in the box. Therefore, my conservative friends, while you’re fretting over the bad economy, and the unguarded border and the inmates running the asylum in Washington, think on these things also, and ask yourself:
If preserving America’s moral values isn’t worth fighting for, what is?
Here is a fascinating, if not bizarre, linkage between allowing marriage equality and legalizing polygamous marriages for hordes of American Muslims. It’s pretty slick how Kupelian rolled up all of these fears — including indoctrinating children into one neat little package:
The answer is: You better care, because once gay marriage is legalized in America – something for which there is virtually no precedent in the 5,000 years of Western Civilization – your schools will be required to teach your children that homosexuality is totally normal, your pastors and rabbis will fear preaching their faith’s core moral values, and gender confusion and immorality will reign supreme in America.
Moreover, polygamy will inevitably be legalized also, since there simply will no longer be any legal basis for keeping polygamy illegal. For Muslims living in the U.S., for whom polygamy is allowed under the Quran (up to four wives), we will see large
numbers of polygamous marriages within the United States of America, just as there are in France today – where polygamy is still illegal!
Kupelian attributes the change of heart of some conservatives to fear of the big bad gays:
There are many other examples, even among top conservatives. It seems most, if not all, are falling away from this jugular issue for the same reason: They’re afraid, and the convenient slide from conservatism to libertarianism – invisible when the issue at hand is government spending, taxation and regulation – comes into full view when dealing with moral issues like homosexuality.
Why are they afraid? The gay activist movement relies heavily on intimidation (or “jamming,” as their marketers label it) and no one likes to be mocked, marginalized, demonized, called ugly names, boycotted, persecuted, prosecuted for “hate crimes” (thought crimes, actually), fined or imprisoned.
Of course, there is another explanation. Perhaps, some conservatives just grew up, got educated on this issue, met some actual gay couples and came to the logical conclusion that LGBT people are not a threat to their marriages or civilization. Having come to that rational view, they increasingly see hysterical and dogmatic people like Kupelian as behind the times and stuck in the past.
Alot of conservatives have a willingness to learn and a willingness to accept change be it small will some will only utilize the 2% and never ever seek to expand their knowledge because people like kupelian think they know it all.
There is a third choice for moral conservatives like me. Allow people to do what they want and keep our own moral values for our own lives while offereing them with gentleness to anyone who wants them. In our pluralistic society we don’t ban the eating of pork because it offends Muslins and Jews but neither should we denigrate those who find pork offensive.
“In the end, there are only two choices: Either we acknowledge as a society, with love and tolerance, that there is something wrong with homosexuality – as we affirmed for centuries, from the Pilgrims’ time until just recently – or we go into terminal denial and tell each other homosexuality is perfectly normal and healthy. If we go that way, we are denying the core moral lessons not just of Christianity and Judaism, but of common sense, experience, medicine and history.”
Two other posts I’ve seen so far today touching on this:
This one is at Lifesite, titled, An Eerie Silence In The Marriage Fight. It riffs off the disappointing turnout, and lack of passion in evidence, at the NOM rallys this month:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/aug/10081607.html
The other is a post from a social conservative who eventually came over to the pro same-sex marriage side. This one is interesting for its insights into how a lot of anti SSM proponents simply aren’t thinking about what is in essence just a gut level response to something they’ve never considered before:
“Is there any more damning moment for an advocate than when he admits that he not only does not know how to justify his own position, but that he believes it is so obvious, so utterly self-evident that it does not need justification at all? For the diehards, intuition is not just enough, it is everything.
“But for the majority of the public, that will likely not suffice — not forever, anyway. It didn’t for me. In the months after that conversation, I found myself repeatedly questioning my own position, and found, after some struggling, that I could not support it…”
This one’s at: http://theamericanscene.com/2010/08/15/intuition-and-marriage
I think however the Prop 8 case turns out eventually, in retrospect we’ll see that it was a critical turning point, when everyone saw, finally, that the other side simply had no case…that their movement was nothing but smoke and mirrors: a shining edifice made of equal parts junk science and junk food religion, which had disastrously suckered in the very people who had built it to deceive others. They strode into that courtroom shining knights defending the honor of marriage. They left it a bunch of rubes, wondering where all their money went.
On August 6th, I took my partner of nine years to my 25th high school reunion,for the first time. I was very nervous and had many thoughts about how my husband would be received by my friends(most of them come from very conservative homes).My fears were dashed, however, when I introduced him to the myriads of friends I went to school with. He was very well received and, in fact, he had a very good time and no one hassled us with the very private and intimate details of our relationship. About the only question they asked was how long we were together.
During the Saturday evening after party, I had numerous heart to hearts with some of my closest classmates who had told asked me about how I felt about Proposition 8 being overturned. I replied that I was happy to hear that it had been overturned,however the gay community was not out of the woods yet. She looked at me and said “You know, I am a heterosexual woman dating a man and I think that gays and lesbians should have the same right to date and marry as I do.” I was very deeply touched by her statement. It gave me new hope that maybe the American way of seeing us as people has finally sunk in to the majority of people.
The entire anti gay movement is dedicated to the effort of keeping gays as the scapegoat that it is perfectly acceptable to hate, despise, deny rights to, and freely tell they are going to hell for being the evil dirty depraved person they are. Each and every one of them, no questions asked. For nothing that a gay person thinks says or does is valid and can never be right because they are gay and therefore “intrinsically evil”. Because we say so. They have no right to a say in the matter. End of discussion. We cannot be wrong on this.
They used to do this not only to the gays but to the Jews, the witches and the heretics. Unfortunately for them witches are not real and Hitler ruined the Jews for them. The heretics were the only ones that won out, hence all the denominations of a so called “Christianity”, many making money keeping down “the gays”. These same people used to claim a biblical right to own people and don’t you dare tell them they don’t you liberal bleeding heart slave lover.
They ignore the fact gays are the people they used to burn alive next to the witches and the heretics and the people Hitler sent to the death camps right along with the Jews.
Both the Jews and the witches were blamed for illness just as the gays are today. It never mattered that the Jews were dying right along side or that there is no such thing as witchcraft, there was someone to blame. And it was a belief sanctioned by the church, both Catholic and Protestant, just like slavery.
They had books and proofs against the witches and the Jews. Holy writ sanctioned by the church comprised of nothing falsehoods. Things which were not then and have never been true. Things which could not be wrong and never could be wrong but were wrong.
After centuries of church sponsored hate all they have left are the gays. The catch all catagory you could use when heretic or witch wouldn’t work and the victim wasn’t a Jew. An entire group for which it was acceptable to deny all human and civil rights. A group which could be imprisoned in this country for dissemination of information, for gathering in groups of two or more in public or private, for touching, for being. People who could be jailed, guilty of nothing but the very fact they existed as they did or as someone claimed they did. Condemned to ridicule and shame, deprivation and hardship. The slightest hint that they might be “that way” justification to throw them out, no questions asked, or to call the authorities to haul them off to the prisons or the asylum. And then there was it’s justification for murder. Another depraved sinner off the streets. They had it coming for being who they were. They were only a filthy…
All justifiable in the eyes of the Lord. For the bible tells me so, human rights and the constitution be damned. Forever and ever. Just like with the Jews, just like with the witches. How dare they infringe upon my right to hate and despise them, to wish to deny them rights. How dare they. Their very being offends me and I have a right granted to me by my religion which supercedes all to denounce them in the public square and to denigrate them as an entire group and condemn them to hell in the afterlife and to make them as miserable in this life as I possibly can. For they deserve no “special” right to the same things I am entitled to because they are on a long list of sins nobody accepts as sins anymore. They have it coming and it is my right to give it to them. If the bible isn’t good enough I have “science” and “facts”, and please ignore the man behind the curtain with evidence which refutes what I say because it cannot be right as it favors the depraved sinners and therefore must be wrong for the bible tells me so.
The gays have to put up with it. For them to not put up with it just proves how evil and debased they are, shoving their sex life in my face, I don’t care if they don’t have sex or not my mere thinking they might is enough.
That folks, is all they have.
Since the 1950′s gays have won the rights in court to form organizations, send information on homosexuality through the mail and to be able to gather in groups of two or more. Laws designed to keep gays from the courthouse have been deemed unconstitutional as were those which criminalized private consensual sex, and the “gay panic” defense is no longer valid.
It is time to kick the modern day witch hunters to the curb and grant their victims, for that is what they are, the right to not live in fear that they might be fired from their employment or kicked out of their home because they are or have the been labeled as gay. The same rights the witch hunters have and wish to deny.
i like the use of the word scold. it is what i myself do to the anti gays every time i write a letter to the editor. i am a scold and proud of it because i happen to be correct.
[...] controversy. One way is to claim that marriage equality will break down all morality and lead to Muslim harems in the U.S. Another tactic is to corner liberals and force them to choose between gay rights and [...]
“Perhaps, some conservatives just grew up, got educated on this issue, met some actual gay couples and came to the logical conclusion that LGBT people are not a threat to their marriages or civilization.”
I think that they’ve found some new n****rs in Muslims and Latinos. Conservatives can only win by trying to make people afraid of something. They’re seeing that they’re getting mileage out of Muslims and Latinos, taking the pressure off of us, at least for the time being.
I continue to be surprised at how little discussion of gender comes up in this discourse. What had to break down before “gay marriage” could up as a cultural possibility was a shift from Husband and Wife/Man and Woman as separate roles sanctioned by the state to equality within the heterosexual couple. Once a husband and a wife have identical legal duties and rights, the gender of the parties becomes an artifact that makes little sense. This is not about procreation alone, but about the entire body of proscribed gender roles.
I cannot imagine that any of these “true conservatives” who is against gay marriage isn’t also – and, perhaps, primarily – opposed to the lifting of traditional gender roles.
Barbara, funny that you say that…I have something I’m writing tomorrow on just that subject.
[...] controversy. One way is to claim that marriage equality will break down all morality and lead to Muslim harems in the U.S. Another tactic is to corner liberals and force them to choose between gay rights and [...]