Two Must-Reads

The first is an article by Gabriel Arana at Huffington Post on why conservatives think they lost on marriage equality:

In an interview, [Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission] told The Huffington Post that one of the movement's main mistakes in the gay marriage fight was assuming traditionalists would always have public opinion on their side. Social conservatives didn't anticipate or prepare for the dramatic turnabout in national sentiment on this issue over the last 10 years, he said, assuming they'd always operate from a position of strength in the culture war. They believed that fundamentally, Americans shared their values.

"I think that many pro-marriage people assumed that we would always represent a majority in American opinion," Moore said. "For a while, that was true. But we needed to be prepared to argue for something that is right regardless of whether or not the majority of Americans agree with us. I think that was a key error."

That is being blind to history. America's social history has been pretty dynamic -- we've gone from voting rights reserved to white landowners to voting being expanded to all white men to all male citizens to women; we've incorporated laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, and in some states a number of other factors (military service, physical or mental disability, marital status) not only into our legal system but into our moral framework. To think that, because most Americans at one time subscribed to a particular set of values (and idea that doesn't really seem to have much basis in reality anyway), they will always subscribe to that set of values, is beyond wishful thinking. (And I might note that the "values" assumed here are not really "American" in any real sense. Yes, there are truly American values, and they are, to some extent, the opposite of the "values" that Moore and his confreres espouse.) And note that Moore is insistent that he and his fellow conservatives are "right," no matter what anyone else thinks.

Moore added that the movement had also failed to put a humane face on its opposition to same-sex unions, though he said he thinks this was not the primary reason for the loss.

"There were some people speaking to this issue from my side who were angry and presented a public face of outrage in a way that I don't think was helpful," Moore said. "Evangelicals don't dislike our gay and lesbian neighbors, and we don't mean them harm."

Two points on this statement: angry, outraged and hateful has been the public face of their movement from the beginning. Take the major voices: Tony Perkins, Brian Brown, Bryan Fischer, Moore himself, among many others: they have consistently pushed a message that labels gays as perverts, pedophiles, Nazis, communists, less than human, which makes that last sentence laughable, at best. It may not be the primary reason for their loss, but it's up there: Americans in general tend not to like extremists very much, and the visible part of the anti-gay movement has been populated by extremists.

On a related note, here's an opinion piece by Amanda Marcotte on the real reason conservatives oppose the ruling in Obergefell, analyzing a piece by Ross Douthat:

While other conservatives moved on to incoherent babbling about “religious liberty”, Douthat used his New York Times column to dig his heels into the argument soundly rejected by Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges: that same-sex marriage is somehow an assault on traditional marriage.

Kennedy argued that the case for same-sex marriage “strengthened, not weakened” the institution of marriage by affirming that it upholds “the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.” Douthat, however, remains skeptical, complaining that “approval of divorce, premarital sex, and out-of-wedlock childbearing” is on the rise and that younger Americans, in particular, take “a more relaxed perspective, in which wedlock is malleable and optional, one way among many to love, live, rear kids—or not.” This sense that marriage is optional offends Douthat greatly, as he sees it as an immoral shunning of duty.

What Douthat objects to -- no-fault divorce, child-bearing out of wedlock, etc., etc. etc., have nothing to do with same-sex marriage, and actually predate the battle over marriage equality by a generation or more. In point of fact, Kennedy was right, and I've said all along that it was more than a little ludicrous for the "Christian" right to loudly proclaim that they were protecting marriage from people who want to be married.

Marcotte does, I think, get to the meat of the resistance:

Douthat isn’t wrong on the facts, even if he’s wrong on his assessment of them. It’s true that women in modern society no longer feel like they have to be married to be granted entrance into adult society. Single women living by and supporting themselves is no longer considered scandalous. Marriage is, bit by bit, becoming more about a partnership between equals who choose each other for the purpose of love and happiness. Which means it’s becoming less about giving men control over women’s lives.

In this sense, Douthat isn’t wrong that “support for same-sex marriage and the decline of straight marital norms exist in a kind of feedback loop.” To accept same-sex marriage is to accept this modern idea that marriage is about love and partnership, instead of about dutiful procreation and female submission. Traditional gender roles where husbands rule over wives are disintegrating and that process is definitely helped along by these new laws allowing that marriage doesn’t have to be a gendered institution at all.

I would say, however, that for most Americans, those traditional gender roles have disintegrated.

I've been wondering why their loss on same-sex marriage has generated such extreme rhetoric on the right. I don't recall that sort of extremism over Loving or even Lawrence. All I can think of is that Obergefell demonstrates beyond any doubt that they have lost any right they might have had to call themselves "mainstream." The country has moved well beyond them, and to their way of thinking, it should be holding still. In one respect, they are right: they're being marginalized, but it's not any great conspiracy doing it to them: they did it to themselves.