Divisive

Who was divisive? Who would be dumb enough to bring up an issue that alienates your own swing voters? Only lawyers could be stupid enough, be so utterly lacking in political acumen as to make gay marriage the issue of the day. But that is what the Massachusetts Supreme Court did. The intelligentsia had tried their engineering game one too many times. “Of course we won’t force it on any state, just because we have stated it is clearly a fundamental human right there is no need to worry about us imposing it on anyone.” The crusading spirit that animates the bench caught up with them as people caught on. They have noticed that the bench is quite uncompromising in its crusading politics. Minor limitations on the right to have the brains sucked out of a child’s cranium? No, any protections of the, what, mass of cells that temporary inhabit the womb of an expectant mother would be an admission that there could be another interest at stake, a rights bearing entity that might throw the legitimacy of the whole engineering project into question. Out with its head! Find that a bit brutal? Well, serves you right for insisting on thinking about things your betters have already gently informed you are outside your areas of competence.

Gay marriage? The triumph of ideology over any kind of practical politics. Where is the flood of gay marriage applicants now that it has been legalizes by Judicial fiat in Mass.? Nowhere. The issue is about ideology. One ideology wants the subject of human society dis-gendered. A fundamentally gendered relationship, a plan imposed by a higher authority than the individual’s hormones, an institution that puts society’s claims over the individual’s needs however the individual defines them, an institutions that defines our obligations as being something more than just handing over money. It is an affront on a ideological level.

And notice who is coming to the other side of the net. Kerry actually used the words almost plaintively: “The President’s position and mine on gay marriage are the same, the same, we have the same position.” Meet the me-to Democrats. The moral issues are at the center of politics because the Democrats in the 70s lead where no one, or at least not a Presidential election winning majority, would follow. Now they are stuck there trying to sidle back into the mainstream of the electorate. Problem is the legal wing of the party hasn’t gotten the memo. They keep yanking their electoral brethren back out to the left wing of the stage just when they had gotten the voters to think of something else. No sooner has their pleading to not think of an elephant receded in memory enough so that people actually stop thinking of the elephant than the elephant shows up flapping its ears and asking if anyone has any peanuts.

Broder ends his column: “a nation still deeply divided, one where most women, city dwellers and minorities voted against the president.” Now needless to say if the Democrats had won with a minority of men, rural people and whites among their voters we wouldn’t have to listen to this solemn lecture about divisiveness. Their voters are the morally entitled, ours are the people who should be reflexively ashamed of themselves. This is what is meant by being divisive. What they really mean is that we are behaving like we won the election.