Lindsay Beyerstein tells us that she is “an award-winning investigative journalist,” but she’ll win no awards for this:
By definition, bigots are people with unshakable baseless prejudices. There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage.
According to Beyerstein, then, “blind prejudice” has defined human society since the dawn of history, and continues to do so except in a relative handful of industrialized Western democracies.
While sic semper hoc may not be a conclusive argument against same-sex marriage, it ought to suffice to defend traditional marriage against Beyerstein’s peremptory condemnation of it as the product of “baseless prejudice.” Granted that the defense of tradition qua tradition generally invites this sort of attack, are our prejudices really as blind and as baseless as Beyerstein says?
You see, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that [the English] are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. . . . Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.
– Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Yet I suppose Beyerstein is a latter-day Jacobin, worshipping in the Temple of Reason, who acknowledges neither duty nor nature and will permit no reference to divine authority:
And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him.
And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you?
And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away.
And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.
But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife;
And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
— Mark 10:-2-9, KJV
Marriage works because men and women are different. (Did I mention it’s National Offend a Feminist Week?) As I wrote in January 2009:
Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. . . . Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man. . . .
This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.
The arguments for same-sex marriage are rooted in the implicit androgyny of egalitarianism, as well as the rejection of divine authority — both of which premises we may just as well call “baseless prejudices.”
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
— 2 Timothy 4:3-4, KJV
Truly Paul’s counsel to Timothy was prophetic, and Beyerstein turns truth on its head when she says of religious opponents of same-sex marriage:
They have the Constitutional right to make up whatever crazy rules they want for marriage within their own religions.
Got that? The notion that marriage involves one man and one woman is one of those “crazy rules” that you just “make up.” Beyerstein seems ignorant of the self-evident fact that marriage existed before there was any government or constitution to recognize or regulate it.
People create governments, and not the other way around. Courts and legislatures are not instituted for the purpose of radically reordering society to fit the intellectual whims of philosophes, nor to satisfy the petulant demands of every unruly faction. (See, “Gay Rights, Gay Rage,” The American Spectator, Nov. 17, 2008.)
A radical reordering of society is exactly what the egalitarian advocates of androgyny are atttempting to accomplish. They are fanatics, and their contemptuous dismissal of opponents as motivated by “blind prejudice” shows what kind of treatment we might expect from them when, having written their preferences into law, they wield the whip hand.
(Hat-tip: Professor Donald Douglas at American Power.)
UPDATE: Noting the rather recent nature of the same-sex marriage crusade, Da Tech Guy asks some relevant questions.
