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Legalisation won't resolve the debate

By Mark Christensen - posted Friday, 26 April 2013


Meanwhile, a sermonising Jonathan Chait argued we "need a reason" to justify trashing homosexual rights. The commentator ridiculed anti-gay marriage Republican Saxby Chambliss, who, "interestingly, understands the problem at some level, but can't intellectualize it".

Lacking in humility and imagination, secular fanatics find themselves compelled to protect, at any cost, the great deception that animates democracy. Embed controversy by framing the debate with literalistic pretensions that confect morality and politics. It's about basic fairness, the argument goes. Ergo opponents of legal equality must be bigots. To disavow enlightened public opinion is to sanction a return to theocracy. Or, as Bruni proudly pronounced, "the legalization of same-sex marriage takes nothing from anyone".

Disingenuously untrue. Resorting to courts and legislatures to resolve differences that arise from the complexities of belonging, is a dispiriting exercise that diminishes social life in ways far more vital than hysterical minority interests can see to admit. America has exhausted its progressive political capital. A "win" on gay marriage won't enhance its moral landscape, though it's likely to leave relations more troubled. Legally hitched homosexuals will still feel hurt and aggrieved. So, what then? More groupthink interventions designed to force what is beyond being forced?

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Though Republican extremists may be conflicted and given to creatively crude statements, they nonetheless intuit, like Dowd's timorous judges, one crucial fact: institutions are ultimately powerless to mediate on moral truth.

Of course their reformative stance appears absurd and offensive to a sneering mob of "free thinkers" too self-regarding to appreciate it's impossible to intellectualize what matters, only experience it as a shared transcendent value. Part of why Chambliss opposes gay marriage is his uncanny sense Americans, including the President, are being duped, and gravely so. Perhaps he eschews empirical evidence and "gotcha" discourse on the basis a legitimizing appeal to such is likely to lead monomaniacal, out-of-touch progressives further from the self-evident truth that personal belief is irreducible to reason alone.

The current political model has taken American civil rights far and wide. Australia has had a similar experience. But it can't go all the way, and believing so is morally and intellectually corrupt.

It is this message – not bigotry – that motivates much of the opposition to gay marriage. It's time to expose the ruse Dowd and others have so completely fallen victim to.

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About the Author

Mark is a social and political commentator, with a background in economics. He also has an abiding interest in philosophy and theology, and is trying to write a book on the nature of reality. He blogs here.

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