“Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
— Viscount Falkland, 1641
“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
— G.K. Chesterton, 1923
“I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years no one will admit they were part of that.”
— Dave Weigel, 2010
Well, as the old Sesame Street song says, one of these things is not like the others. Falkland and Chesterton were conservatives, unafraid to defend sturdy tradition against the impetuous demands issued by advocates of Progress, so-called.
It was an opposition to this radical sense of Progress — i.e., the inexorable overturning of every existing institution as a necessity of “social justice” — that informed Bill Buckley’s famous description of National Review‘s mission as standing athwart history, yelling, “Stop!”
Buckley confessed in 1955 that such resistance was unfashionable, that he was yelling “Stop!” at a time when “no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” And it ill-behooves conservatives more than a half century later to begin fearing the impatience of the apostles of Progress.
Equality vs. Liberty
Weigel proclaims that he will “happily entertain arguments for the contrary,” but why should he? In the manner of all bien-pensants, he believes he is not merely right but good, and therefore that those who disagree with him are not merely mistaken, but evil.
As I have said of others, Weigel’s basic problem is that he is young. The young generally know only what they have been taught, and teaching nowadays is a profession increasingly monopolized by those who subscribe to dogmatic notions of egalitarianism, the established faith of academic today. Dissenters are as rare as witches in 17th-century Salem (whereas witches are now quite plentiful on campus, as Larry Summers could attest), and we need not marvel that few dare speak heresy.
According to the egalitarian view, inequality is always synonymous with injustice. From such a perspective, those who insist that homosexual relations should be treated differently than marriage — an institution ancient and universal, held by Judeo-Christian tradition to be a holy covenant in accordance with divine commandment — are benighted, prejudiced and, as Weigel says, “bigoted.”
Weigel long worked for the libertarian journal Reason. Despite my own profound libertarian tendencies (being an admirer of the Austrian economists Mises and Hayek), I’ve often found myself at odds with those Reasonoids who see same-sex marriage as a libertarian issue when the arguments for it are in fact egalitarian.
Rather than merely insisting that homosexuals be left alone by government — free from legal compulsion — advocates of same-sex demand that government make war on an established institution in order to compel recognition of a disputed equality.
Having examined the data, I feel no need to expound on sociological statistics demonstrating that this is just another erroneous egalitarian argument. We cannot make different things the same, merely by pretending that they are the same. (This is, after all, National Offend a Feminist Week.)
Goose-Stepping Toward Utopia
Is all opposition to this egalitarian demand of same-sex marriage a function of “bigotry”? Is the inexorable march of Progress so hasty that in 20 years, as Weigel says, no one will admit to having opposed it?
Certainly it may seem so to the young, who have very little experience of history. Yet Weigel will learn, if he does not already know, that history is not a matter of irrestible, impersonal trends, but can be changed by courageous individuals who decide in obscurity on a course of action that leads them to fame.
Who had ever heard of Whittaker Chambers, before he decided to expose Alger Hiss? In abandoning communism to become an anti-communist, Chambers believed he was joining a cause doomed to defeat. Yet his example inspired others, famously including Ronald Reagan, and within a half-century the Soviet empire had been consigned to the ash-heap of history.
If it seems to Weigel that cultural acceptance of homosexuality makes same-sex marriage inevitable, this is because he makes the mistake of thinking of Progress in terms of extrapolating the recent past. True, gay-rights radicals have made tremendous inroads in the last 20 years and, if they continue at that pace, their opponents will be utterly vanquished in another 20 years.
By the same token, however, if my 11-year-old son keeps growing at his current rate, he’ll be 14 feet tall in 20 years. Even successful political movements do not grow forever, as Karl Rove learned the hard way when his “permanent Republican majority” collapsed in 2006-08. The tide of gay-rights radicalism may have already advanced so far so fast as to outstrip its political resources so that it will now begin to recede, consolidating as part of the status quo, rather than to maintain its revolutionary momentum. And it is not easy to see why such a point may have been reached.
Identity and Demagoguery
Insofar as homosexuals sought only liberty and tolerance, they met little resistance, as even the most conservative Americans take pride in their “live and let live” attitude. Yet Americans balked when it was argued that the logical extension of such tolerance required recognition of homosexuality as the basis of a legal and political identity.
Over the past few decades, Americans have developed a dyspeptic reaction to identity politics and a distaste for the endless legal harassment incited by claims of discriminatory victimhood. The resemblance between the most obstreporous advocates of same-sex marriage and such identity-politics demagogues as Al Sharpton is sufficient to inspire quiet resistance even among those who publicly deplore “homophobia” (a term requiring scare-quotes due to its bogus assertion of diagnostic certainty).
Conservatives need make no slippery-slope arguments about polygamy and pederasty to justify opposition to same-sex marriage. It is sufficient to cite Falkland’s maxim in saying that, the necessity of change having not been demonstrated, it is therefore necessary not to change. If liberal Wednesday should in fact give way to radical Thursday, conservatives can cite Chesterton in ceasing to argue with the advocates of Progress — although polite silence ought not be confused with fearful assent.
You can’t repeal the law of unintended consequences, and good intentions still pave the road to an unpleasant destination. It is only the bigotry of Progress that denies these durable truths.
