You can’t compromise with them:
I very much doubt we’ll get a constitutional right for teams of people to get “married,” but I have every confidence the drumbeat will grow louder. Social justice – forever ill-defined so as to maximize the power of its champions – has become not just an industry but also a permanent psychological orientation among journalists, lawyers, educators, and other members of the new class of eternal reformers.
By no means are social-justice warriors always wrong. But they are untrustworthy, because they aren’t driven by a philosophy so much as an insatiable appetite that cannot take yes for an answer. No cookie will ever satisfy them. Our politics will only get uglier, as those who resist this agenda realize that compromise is just another word for appeasement.
Related: You cannot accommodate the Left.
Because they’re totalitarian. Glenn is right:
I recommend operant conditioning instead. Complaining and crusading is what they do, but even a flatworm is smart enough to turn away from pain. Make it painful for them to mess with things that you consider important, and they’ll likely turn their attentions elsewhere.
Yup. As someone said, punch back twice as hard.
[Thursday-morning update]
Related thoughts from Mark Steyn:
I find the idea that tens of millions of American “traditionalist” conservatives are going to lead their own lives immune to the broader culture somewhat unlikely. Were the same-sex marriage decision, for example, merely a judicial ruling, Barack Obama would not have lit up the White House in LGBT rainbow colors. It is after all “the people’s house” and half the people aren’t entirely on board with this. But he chose to see this not as a mere judge’s ruling but as an ideological victory – and to celebrate it as such. And he’s thereby telling you that this shift is an official one, backed by the state, and state power, and it won’t stop here.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, in an actual bit of jurisprudential footnoting in the midst of his Hallmark greeting card on the raptures of gay love, said that organizations would still be free to teach and promote the old form of restrictive straights-only marriage. That’s awfully sporting of him, but the Boy Scouts of America provide a clue as to how it’s likely to work out. In the late Nineties, the BSA said no to gay scoutmasters. I was on the floor of the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in 2000 when they had some Eagle scouts as an honor guard – and in my section of the crowd everyone booed. And I remember thinking, “Man, these Dems are nuts. Booing boy scouts?”
But the booers won. Over the next decade, gay-friendly churches (Episcopalian, Congregational, and the other post-Christian ones) booted the scouts from church halls where they’d met for decades; Disney cut them off the list of approved charities to which their employees were permitted to donate their “Ears To You” fundraising proceeds; other corporate benefactors from the US soccer league to Lockheed Martin severed their ties …and the number of new recruits to scouting dwindled remorselessly, and so did their finances. And in the end the boy scouts’ leader caved – but too late. In the blink of an eye, the boy scouts had been, as my friend Ezra Levant likes to say, “de-normalized”, and banished to the fringe, and nice soccer mommies don’t want l’il Jimmy playing on the extremist fringe.
That’s quite an accomplishment. After all, until Democrats figured it was safe to boo them, boy scouts were so mainstream that their very name is a synonym for someone kindly and pure and good-hearted. Take litigious lunatic and Nobel Prize appropriator Michael E Mann, who says here that the argument between the global warming crowd and us deniers has been “likened at times to a fight between a boy scout and a terrorist – and you know, we are the boy scouts”. Which would make me the terrorist. When Mann calls himself a “boy scout”, he doesn’t mean he’s a homophobic hater – although I’m certainly happy to advance that line in court if it helps. Mann is using “boy scouts” as a synonym for “the good guys”.
That’s how effective Big Gay is: They took “the good guys”, and made ’em the bad guys, in nothing flat.
How many other groups are willing to be boy-scouted in the years ahead? How much faith is there in “faith-based institutions”?
Totalitarians.
[Update a few minutes later]
The coming wedding between social conservatives and libertarians:
as the dust settles on the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, it’s becoming clearer that the debate over the issue is going to shift to one of religious freedom. And on that issue, there’s much more of an opening for libertarians and social conservatives to get along.
At the core of libertarianism is the believe that people should be able to do whatever they want short of using force or coercion on somebody else. It makes sense why libertarians wouldn’t oppose gay marriage, for the reason that two men or women getting married doesn’t injure anybody else.
But with gay marriage legal, the cultural debate has been moving to issues such as: Should a religiously observant baker or photographer be forced to participate in gay weddings? Or, should a Catholic Church be forced to perform gay marriages?
Whatever their differences on the underlying issue of homosexuality and gay marriage, it will be hard for many libertarians to justify any sort of government coercion forcing individuals to violate their deeply held beliefs. As a result, they’ll find themselves increasingly — and begrudgingly — on the same side as social conservatives on many of the looming debates.
Yes.
