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

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.