Gay Marriage Conservative Tokenism

The Colorado Independent posted a muckraking essay today smearing Focus on the Family for its purported $727,000 in contributions to the Yes on 8 campaign in California: "Focus on the Family Vastly Outpaced Mormon Spending on Proposition 8."

Commenting on the piece (with its scandalous aspersions to alleged Mormon extremists), I saw a new term of repudiation at Pam Spaulding's: "the fundievangelical movement." Spaulding also attacks Focus on the Family as an "evil, Bible-beating, anti-gay organization."

All that for exercising First Amendment rights through the political process? Of course, Spaulding applauded the Stalinist intimidation tactics of the No on H8 activists who are mapping the names and ZIP codes of financial backers of the California initiative, so she's consistent in her totalitarianism.

But what about the "young turks" at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen? You wouldn't think a bunch of rising intellectuals would stoop to Pam Spaulding's level of rank demonization, right?

Well, think again:

The true driving power behind the anti-gay marriage movement resides in a community with many names. For the sake of simplicity I’ll return to the tried and true Religious Right (and the Religious Right’s red headed stepchildren, the Mormons).

Couching their anti-gay agenda in Christian dogma, the Religious Right has been successful in essentially swimming up stream against the march towards equality for homosexuals. While homosexuality is enjoying more social acceptance now than during any other period in American history, the Religious Right is also enjoying successes in actively inhibiting homosexual rights, enacting constitutional gay marriage bans in a number of states.

This would seem counter-intuitive at first, after all, if gays are moving up in the world, how is it that they are suffering setbacks on things like their right to marry?

This extraordinary piece continues with this eye-opening proposal:

What makes a marriage sacred? That answer is different for many people. People of faith are likely to reply that the sanctity of their marriage is divined from the authority of their God. For those who are without faith, they are more apt to say that the sanctity of the marriage resides in the marriage itself, and the common union between the two partners involved. Further, of the faithful, the devout churchgoers may say that their unity is blessed by their God through their church, while those who are of faith but skeptical of organized religion may decide that the church does not bestow that happy blessing, but God gives it to them anyway.

The point that I’m getting at is that in a country where everyone is free to choose what they believe, the sanctity of marriage is something that is not universal, but is instead unique to the situation. I have a coworker that feels that God blesses both his marriage and mine. I personally believe that God has nothing to do with it, and the sanctity of my marriage comes from the fact that my wife and I are stubbornly attached to each other.

The solution? Simple. Abolish all marriage.

Abolish all marriage? Okay, let's just overturn thousands of years of social custom for the sake of the self-proclaimed "right" of a tiny oppositional minority of the population to be married

But I've dissected the left's gay marriage totalitarianism every which way since last November. What interests me here is that the proprietors of Ordinary Gentlemen are ostensibly conservatives. Yep, these folks are supposedly among the "young turks" Robert Stacy McCain identifies in his essay, Young Turks and Gay Marriage." Or, as Helen Rittelmeyer puts it:

I would add ... that support for same-sex marriage has become a mark, not only of defeatism, but of self-conscious tokenism among young conservatives. Being publicly pro-SSM is the quickest way for a young journalist to signal that he's one of the right-wingers it's okay to like. Haven't they heard that it's better to be feared than loved? Or, to put it less glibly, the real respectability of a solid argument is preferable to the worthless respectability one gets by being on the Harmless Right.

It's an interesting demographic, this young, harmless conservative tokenism, except I don't think these folks are all that harmless. Their effluence just works to feed progressive bull to the media's Obamatons. Besides, as cowardly as these folks are, their musings chum the waters for more dangerous folks like RAWMUSCLEGLUTES.

The bulk of the guys at Ordinary Gentlemen are supposedly of Burkean persuasions and libertarian leanings (Kyle Moore, the author of the abolish marriage proposal above, is liberal). But a regular reading of the posts shows little deviation from the godless licentiousness seen on the nihilist left - indeed, these guys are pretty much atheists through and through. For all the long-winded "intellectual" dialog, the page offers mostly unexceptional commentary, the type that's routinely available on any number of the more tasteless blogs found across the netroots fever swamps. The Ordinary Gents are all into bashing neoconservatives and excoriating pro-lifers. The blog's mission is to encourage "internal" debate, but frankly that sound a bit incestuous, and with the public's Obamessianism already starting to fade, this league's honeymoon likely winding down as well.