Decline and Fall

The good news about Mike Huckabee is that he no longer believes AIDS patients should be quarantined, as he once did back in 1992. On the other hand, Samhita and Feministing directs my attention to this gem in a GQ interview:

I don’t think the issue’s about being against gay marriage. It’s about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that’s important. You have to have a basic family structure. There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it’s one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that’s their business.

So I suppose Blackstone-era family law must still be intact here in the West, because otherwise our civilization would have perished long ago. Or maybe conceptions of marriage and family structure are constantly shifting and this idea that they never change is just a cop-out effort to avoid squarely making the case for discrimination against gays and lesbians. My money's going on number two.

Photo by Flickr user Rneches used under a Creative Commons license