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Yet Another Pro-Discrimination Argument
Always follow the typos. They reveal what editors aren’t researching.
Yesterday’s example of anti-trans jackfoolery in a major newspaper was a line connecting a couple articles by Jonathan Rauch to the latest column by David Brooks.
In 2004, Rauch published Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. That same year, he participated in a public debate at the university I attended, but that’s another story. In short, in the 2004 debate, I was disappointed by the weakness of his pro-gay-marriage argument, and the deficiencies bothered me so much that I‘m still intellectually and emotionally processing them 18 years later.
David Brooks is another conservative commentator who has supported gay marriage at least since 2003, if only because, as he wrote then in the New York Times: “Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide.”
That said, here is what I want to say about the conservative argument made by Brooks in the New York Times this very week.
‘A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage’
In 2009, Rauch co-authored an op-ed, “A Reconciliation on Gay Marriage,” with David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values and the author of The Future of Marriage. Blankenhorn opposed same-sex marriage at the time, though he changed his mind three years later. The two men considered themselves to be proposing a “deal” on behalf of “each side”—though of course it’s unclear who sent them to the fictional bargaining table—amounting to a “sensitive compromise” so there could be “healthier, calmer” dialogue in the future.
Their proposal, which they made in under 1,000 words: Allow U.S. states to recognize same-sex couples, if they wish, and to label those relationships as they wish (“marriage” or “civil union”). The states ought to have “religious-conscience protections,” though, so that “religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions” in, for example, employee benefits packages or church rental policies. To encourage states to explicitly permit this religiously perpetrated discrimination, the federal government will recognize same-sex partnerships with the federal…
