www.mereorthodoxy.com

Matthew Lee Anderson #wingnut #fundie mereorthodoxy.com

Now, it is doubtlessly the case that conservatives have sometimes defended and promoted certain illiberal laws, like sodomy laws, which gay marriage supporters have effectively turned against us in support of their own cause. I am opposed to such laws, for a variety of reasons, but one of which is that by creating an overly legalized context for the preservation of sexual norms, they tacitly transfer authority for such maintenance to the government. This potentially creates a false confidence in the stability of such norms, and threatens to displace the first and primary defender of sexual norms, namely the Church, as well as the family itself and all the non-governmental spheres of civil society. While such laws once enjoyed wide support, they were also overly morally restrictive and intrusive. Such overreaches have proved enormously costly to our own position in the world since the gay community has effectively and powerfully used them to portray themselves (with some legitimacy) as a persecuted minority.

But as my friend Erick Erickson has said repeatedly, “You will be made to care.” Because in the same-sex marriage regime, dissenters threaten to overturn the apple cart. The eagerness by which dissenting views are being pushed out of public and any debate is being silenced may be some of the strongest evidence we have for the view’s intrinsic falsity.

Except. Except. I have sometimes said that the central question facing our society is whether there can be mercy in the gay marriage debate. I am not the only person to ask it, nor was I the first to think of it. But it captured me the moment I first heard it, and it haunts me still. It is mercy that is at stake in our current moment. For mercy is a response to a wrong done, and I have no doubt that conservatives have in the past occasionally fallen prey to hubris in their zeal to maintain norms that they think are true. There are few more liberal qualities than mercy, for mercy is a kind of permissiveness where judgment is owed. And mercy refuses to treat the status quo as determinative: it recognizes the freedom of humanity to rise above our current state of wronging each other, a freedom which is itself constituted by the giving of mercy in the first place. Such a mercy is what Andrew Sullivan defended in the excommunication of Brendan Eich from the Church of Silicon Valley.

The surest and easiest way the LGBT community could prove me wrong would be to begin extending mercy toward those of us who are hopelessly and cheerfully lost on the wrong side of history, and to somehow convince themselves that the usefulness of the fiction for their cause that religious conservatives are intrinsically bigoted in their views has come to an end. Whether they will remains to be seen. But regardless of how implausible such a reversal seems or how the structural forces of our society are opposed to it, as long as the possibility of conversion remains I will continue to stay foolish in my hope.

Frank Turk #fundie mereorthodoxy.com

The surest way the LGBT community could prove you wrong, Matthew, is to say something like this: "Our deepest-held belief about our state in life is that we were born this way -- so making our sexual identities illegal seems like a bad idea to us. But let's face it: the vast majority of the human race was not born this way, so the idea of a man having sex with a man or a woman having sex with a woman is revolting to the rest of you. So we have to navigate the waters here as if our most deeply-held belief about ourselves (and the rest of you) is true. That means we can't expect the rest of you to accept the way we live any more than we can accept the way you live as a norm for ourselves."

If they said this in any meaningful way, then it would be time to take them at face value rather than as people intent on hiding their real motives. I mean: this is how someone like Camille Paglia approaches this problem. She completely agrees that what Queer advocates want is nothing like Christian homes and families, and all she wants is to be left to her own devices. She knows what she wants is nothing like what you and I want, Matthew -- and in being honest about that she establishes a basis for the dialog.

The LGBT position today is deeply dishonest. It's like any other cult you might find which opposes historical Christianity: it has to lie about what it means when it uses common terms in order to fool the uninformed listener into a state of complicity. And what the rest of us are faced with is a very simple choice: allow ourselves to be lied to by them and by doing so concede all of our moral and cultural stock in this fight to them, or demand that they tell the truth about what they are requiring of us and see if that's what we can accept.