Brownback And Marriage

Watching the following clip from the Republican debate last night, you can feel the death of an argument. Conservatism has often stood for freedom; now, so often, it doesn't. And the Granite State conservatives still in the GOP - and not chased out by the Christianists - know that freedom means freedom for everybody, as Dick Cheney once put it. Notice also Brownback's outright lie about same-sex marriage in the north of Europe. He is clearly claiming that after equal marriage rights were introduced there, heterosexual marriage rates plummeted and illegitimacy rates soared. He knows that isn't true. In fact, that kind of crude causal, chronological relationship has even been denied by the anti-marriage equality advocates like Stanley Kurtz. If you have to lie to maintain an argument, it's a moribund one: