Brendan O'Neill: defending the nanny state in the name of freedom

One of the strongest arguments for allowing same-sex couples to marry is personal freedom.

The state has no right telling me, you or anyone else who we can and can't marry.

When the government effectively says the world would be better off if I married a woman, instead of the man whose selfless love has carried me through the best part of the last decade, it is nannying on steroids.

Perhaps that's why British columnist and editor, Brendan O'Neill, is so strident on the subject.

He is a libertarian and an opponent of freedom to marry.

The desire to trivialise and divert attention from the compelling freedom-based case in favour of reform may be what has driven him to concoct a freedom-based case against.

O'Neill argues that the recent campaign against former Mozilla boss, Brendan Eich, for donating to anti-marriage equality groups was not an isolated incident but reflects authoritarianism at the heart of the freedom-to-marry movement.

Barely concealed below rhetoric about tolerance is a ruthless desire by western political elites to undermine marriage and reshape society by allowing same-sex couples to walk down the aisle.

It starts with "Orwellian" manoeuvres like changing "husband" and "wife" to "partner", progresses through court cases against businesses that don't want to bake gay wedding cakes and ends with social ostracism, and even the police, silencing all dissent.

This kind of fear mongering is most often heard from conservative religious leaders, not libertarians.

But O'Neill mimics their tactic well, misconstruing a few isolated examples while ignoring a host of contrary evidence, and then drawing apocalyptic conclusions.

He laments that marriage equality opponents have been called "hateful" and had their websites hacked, which is of course wrong, but it's no worse than pro-equality advocates being demonised as Nazis, receiving death threats or losing their jobs.

He attacks Americans who "preach about the virtues of homosexuality" to Africans while ignoring the many more Americans who have pushed for the death penalty for homosexuality in Africa for years.

His attack on "elites" ignores the fact that freedom to marry has popular support in every country it has been achieved.

His concern about the disappearance of marital language and values ignores the fact that many same-sex couples marry precisely because they value commitment and family and want to be part of time-honoured institution.

His example of dissent being stifled by the state – police action against anti-equality protesters in Paris – was actually about the dissenters marching down the city's busiest thoroughfare when they had previously agreed not to.

But what struck me more than all O'Neill's factual confection, was who he has decided to stand with.

If you remove "gay marriage" from O'Neill's article and insert "racial desegregation" you have an article that could have been written by any opponent of black civil rights in the US in the 1960s.

Like O'Neill, opponents of desegregation accused liberal elites of imposing new and unwanted values on ordinary folk using the full force of the state as well as a suddenly-discovered moral conviction that labelled all opponents of change "bigots".

Like O'Neill, they accused advocates for change of intimidation, transformed the disadvantaged into aggressors and the privileged into victims, and predicted the world would be turned on its head.

Like O'Neill, who says he was happy with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, they conceded slavery had been a bad thing but desegregation was a step too far.

Like O'Neill, who thinks freedom to marry conceals a sinister "relativist" agenda of destroying marriage, family and tradition, they feared the civil rights movement was a cover for communism.

Like O'Neill, who says he is defending freedom and tradition from tyrannical centralising governments, they said they were defending freedom and tradition from tyrannical centralising governments.

O'Neill would probably condemn what I have written as an example of precisely the problem he identifies: freedom-to-marry advocates intimidating their opponents by comparing them to racists.

My response is that I'm not equating his opposition to marriage equality to racism.

I’m simply saying he presents his case with the same flawed and discredited rhetorical ploys as racists once presented theirs.

It didn’t work then and thankfully it won’t work now.