The Left's Three Techniques on Marriage Redefinition -- and How to Counter Them
The Left has had some success in its push to redefine marriage, for readily apparent reasons: They dominate the media, they dominate the academy and, as we saw last week, they dominate the courts. Certainly dominance in the elite sectors of opinion-shaping helps.
But the Left also has deployed three distinct tactics:
We need to better understand the Left's strategy, for there are lessons here.
Who could be against expanding benefits for more people?
That's the first technique the Left used: Oversimplify the issue while personalizing it. Redefine marriage so more people get health care or tax exemptions or whatever other grab bag of goodies you want to focus on. (Never mind that you don't have to redefine marriage to solve policy problems.)
Viewed in this light, the marriage debate is like so many other liberal-conservative divides. Take almost any bad social or economic policy. It's easy to identify the winners--the family getting Obamacare, the corn farmer getting a subsidy, the bank getting bailed out, the worker making an inflated wage. These all can be cast as stories of people getting "stuff."
Conservatives rightly argue that these bad policies come with significant social costs. But although it's easy to point to those who get themselves some government pork, it's harder to explain how as a result everyone's health care now costs a little bit more and quality increases more slowly, how we're all drinking ridiculous corn syrup instead of sugar in our soda, how fewer entry-level jobs are open when you force businesses to pay more than they can afford.
The same is true of the marriage debate. It takes effort and discipline to explain how an institution like marriage works, what its public purpose is and what the social costs are--especially to the least advantaged--if we redefine it. The Left deploys empty slogans--"marriage equality"--without ever saying what marriage is or why marriage matters, and then tells moving stories about same-sex couples who just want to love each other and have the same "rights" as anyone else.
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Read more: www.theblaze.com
Viewed in this light, the marriage debate is like so many other liberal-conservative divides. Take almost any bad social or economic policy. It's easy to identify the winners--the family getting Obamacare, the corn farmer getting a subsidy, the bank getting bailed out, the worker making an inflated wage. These all can be cast as stories of people getting "stuff."
Conservatives rightly argue that these bad policies come with significant social costs. But although it's easy to point to those who get themselves some government pork, it's harder to explain how as a result everyone's health care now costs a little bit more and quality increases more slowly, how we're all drinking ridiculous corn syrup instead of sugar in our soda, how fewer entry-level jobs are open when you force businesses to pay more than they can afford.
The same is true of the marriage debate. It takes effort and discipline to explain how an institution like marriage works, what its public purpose is and what the social costs are--especially to the least advantaged--if we redefine it. The Left deploys empty slogans--"marriage equality"--without ever saying what marriage is or why marriage matters, and then tells moving stories about same-sex couples who just want to love each other and have the same "rights" as anyone else.
.........
Read more: www.theblaze.com
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