9.20.2004
Mark Steyn on the woes of marriage-definitional adjustments.
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” nor “Well, I dunno, it just don’t sound right” were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter – the media and the courts.
But the activists’ intellectual rigor only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of “traditional marriage” do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy and bestiality, the activists roll their eyes and go into “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who’ve built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don’t want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.
He makes the case that polygamy is oh-so-much-closer than one would think. It is a post 9/11 world, after all, and a great portion of the muslim world does not outlaw it.
In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land but his new land assimilating to him.
Indeed.
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” nor “Well, I dunno, it just don’t sound right” were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter – the media and the courts.
But the activists’ intellectual rigor only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of “traditional marriage” do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy and bestiality, the activists roll their eyes and go into “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who’ve built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don’t want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.
He makes the case that polygamy is oh-so-much-closer than one would think. It is a post 9/11 world, after all, and a great portion of the muslim world does not outlaw it.
In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land but his new land assimilating to him.
Indeed.
// posted by HunterByrd @ 3:36 PM 
