How to defend marriage when the "sense" of common sense is no longer common.

Now That We're All Haters...

by Brian Brown

To defend marriage, we must reframe the narratives

 that shape our culture and our minds.

In a recent conversation with a dozen well-educated young social conservatives, I found that hardly any held to what ten years ago would have been considered the conservative position on marriage. 

A few had accepted the idea that marriage was a social construction that a majority could change. 

Others opted for the view that it was a religious institution, and political outcomes on the subject didn't really matter. 

Still others thought that there were just other, more winnable, battles worth fighting. 

The most common sentiment: even though none thought a same-sex relationship was a marriage, almost none wanted to play for a losing team whose objective was a national stranglehold on people's happiness.

Common sense has apparently changed a lot in only a few years. 

When the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was passed in 1996, the overwhelming majority considered it common sense to protect such a fundamental institution as marriage. 

By the time of the Supreme Court's ruling on DOMA this summer in United States v. Windsor, the court's majority considered it common sense that those same people could only have been motivated by mean-spiritedness. 

As Justice Scalia summarized in his dissent, "The majority says that the supporters of this Act acted with malice--with the 'purpose to disparage and to injure' same-sex couples. It says that the motivation for DOMA was to 'demean'; to 'impose inequality'; to 'impose . . . a stigma'; to deny people 'equal dignity'; to brand gay people as 'unworthy'; and to 'humiliate' their children."

In such a context, the young people in my conversation weren't being unreasonable. 

They all felt the pressure of opposing the dominant cultural narrative that had shaped their short adult lives. 

Some had had their perceptions of reality altered by it, and the rest didn't have the will or the strength to swim against its overwhelming current. 

In this narrative, officially endorsed inWindsor by the highest court in the land, it is common sense that marriage advocates are all haters.

What, then, is a hater to do?

He can't appeal to common sense. He feels he shouldn't even have to say some of the things he does, because they should be obvious. 

But his years of organizing systematic reasons why his opponents shouldn't tear down the metaphorical fence have come to nothing--not because he isn't right, not because there is no natural law, but because cultural conflicts are often about what gets to count as common sense.

Reason doesn't happen in a vacuum--it's conditioned by narratives in the culture around us and indeed in our own minds.
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