“We don’t know what we’re doing, because we don’t know what we’re undoing.”

Scalia Protest at Princeton Raises an Important Question

by Regis Martin

When does it become impermissable for a self-governing people to pass laws that will ensure the survival of the things they love?  When they no longer command a majority of the electorate?  Is that the standard?  

Certainly among people of democratic disposition, it is a constitutional given that any time a plurality of voters take charge, they are more or less at liberty to set aside whatever arrangements were in place before they assumed control.

In other words, that massive tectonic shift in the culture we’ve been witnessing over these past fifty years, is about to be given formal and official sanction from the political process.  All the awfulness of the culture, as it were, will sooner or later be codified into law.

Isn’t this what the debate over Gay Rights is finally about?  It is not a civil liberties issue; the proponents of gay marriage are not preoccupied with matters of fairness.  What they are determined on is nothing less than the destruction of the traditional family, which is an institution whose very survival depends on the maintenance of marriage as men and women have practiced it for thousands of years.   Now that the popular culture is no longer on board with this, it is seen as a burden that increasingly nobody wants to bear.

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In other words, what are we to do with this sense of instinctive revulsion some of us continue to feel when faced with sexual perversion?  Is it healthy and natural to feel this way?  Or must we move actively to suppress it on the grounds that, enlightened opinion having educated us to view all forms of sexual expression as equally valid and good, only rank bigotry can explain the persistence of the outrage we nevertheless feel?  And if that is the case, then what on earth do we do about other expressions of disgust and revulsion that seem to well up spontaneously from within?   If it is no longer permissible to be revolted by the one, how do we justify the other?  Is it plausible that aversion to homosexual behavior can safely be pronounced as old fashioned, vestigial, and thus no longer a matter of moral importance, but not, say, homicidal behavior, aversion to which we need to preserve and even to stoke up now and again lest our appetite for justice weaken?  Can we really have it both ways?  Or is it an all or nothing proposition?

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