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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

A Gay Voice Against Marriage Equality

By The Daily Dish
Dec 31 2008, 12:13 PM ET

You have to search high and low but Andrew Breitbart tracked one down (one Charles Winecoff). Read the piece for yourself. It's a strange mix: mainly hathos at victim-mongering liberals (no big disagreement here); and an argument that gays should simply accept the cultural norms around marriage:

The traditional definition of family remains sacrosanct to most Americans, and has since long before the Stonewall Riots brought gay rights out of the closet.  There’s nothing wrong with trusting in the conventional notion of the nuclear family, just as there is nothing wrong with being openly gay.  These two belief systems need to learn to COEXIST, as the bumper stickers say.  And that requires a two-way street.

“But Spain allows gay marriage – and that’s a Catholic country!”  So what.  Spain doesn’t have three hundred million people living in it.

But seeking equality surely is a way for the two belief systems to coexist. Not a whit of heterosexuals' rights and privileges and families is affected, after all, and most of us who support marriage equality do so because we admire the stability that marriage gives straights. More to the point, Winecoff supports full and equal rights for gay couples under the law:



Should lesbians and gays who want to make a home and raise kids be discriminated against from the federal level down?  Of course not.  Should committed gay partners enjoy the same benefits as married heterosexual couples?  Absolutely – and as far as I can tell, in a growing number of states, they do (and if they don’t, trust me, they will).

So why am I defending the Mormons?  To crib from Flip Wilson, the 8MP trailer made me do it (which may indicate how effective the movie will be when it finally opens).

To my mind, this is Breitbartism. It is not a principled conservatism; it is a cultural anti-liberalism so deep it forces people to take positions they otherwise wouldn't. No one should take a position on civil rights because a movie trailer made them retch. Seriously. That's not an argument; it's a posture.

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