Dan Greenfield has another brilliant essay which identifies precisely the absurd intellectual underpinnings of the left’s only-too-successful moral jiu-jitsu.

The rhetoric of equality asserts a just cause while overlooking the social good. Rights are demanded. The demand is absolute and the logic for it remains left behind in a desk drawer on the wrong side of the table. Instead there are calls for empathy. “If you only knew a gay couple.” Hysterical condemnations. “I’m pretty sure you’re the devil”, one recent email to me began. And a whole lot of vague promises about the good things that will follow once we’re all paying for it.

We aren’t truly moving toward anarchy or some libertarian order, but a calculated form of repression in which shrill demands substitute for legal guidelines and those who scream the loudest get the most rights.

The new freedoms are largely random and chaotic. Donate enough money to the right people while helping out the left and a special addition to the marriage split-level house will be carved out for you. Why? Because there will be a lot of yelling. Naturally. And if the polygamists yell loudly enough and donate enough money, they’ll get their own marriage expansion as well because that is how things work now.

There is no longer a fixed notion of rights. The trappings of equality and angry causes are hollow. The legal doctrine on which courts make their decisions are targets in search of arrows, emotions hunting around for precedents to wrap them in. These decisions are not rational, but rather rationalizations. Their only anchor is a new role for government in protecting any group that is officially marginalized.

The old Bill of Rights extended rights irrespective of group membership. The new one wipes out universal rights and replaces them with particular privileges. Entire amendments may sink beneath the waves, but a few groups get comfortable deck chairs on the Titanic.

Why is one group protected rather than another? Why do gay activists get a government-bonded right, complete with Federal enforcement, while polygamy is outlawed? The only answers are rationalizations. With morality sinking fast and few common values that the people in charge will accept, there is no longer a common value system to rely on.

Progressive morality is constantly being reshaped in tune to the whims of the left. It can’t be relied upon, because it isn’t there. The only thing fixed about it is the need to fight for the oppressed, which not coincidentally at all is also the shaky civil rights era legal doctrine on which the whole modern house of cards rests.

Matt K. Lewis explains that the current (losing for conservatives) attempt to defend individual business’s right to decline to bake Gay wedding cakes or photograph Gay weddings is the next to last stop before the conflict between egalitarianism and religious freedom arrives inside the churches’ doors.

this is a tough issue that pits things we value as a society against things we value as a society.

We have reached a point in the gay rights debate where all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. We are now entering into the zero-sum game phase of the debate, where gay rights and religious liberty must collide. (In other words, the cake is only so big. If you take a piece, you are guaranteeing the other guy has less cake.)

So who’s right? My guess is one could guarantee public opinion is on either side of the issue, depending on how you frame the question. If, for example, you were to ask someone whether or not “businesses should be allowed to deny services to same-sex couples,” the answer would, of course, be “no.”

On the other hand, ask Americans if “government should have the right to forcefully coerce Christians to violate their convictions,” and the answer would also be “no.” …

This is really a surrogate battle. A much bigger one is coming.

Opponents of these bills score points when they argue that florists and bakers aren’t exactly granting their imprimatur when they make a cake or put together a flower arrangement for a gay wedding. Additionally, they are correct in assuming that most Christians, whether they agree with same-sex marriage, or not, would still bake the cake. In fact, this could be seen as an example of Christian love.

But this is another example of how this schism cannot be easily brushed aside like so many wedding cake crumbs. In recent years, libertarian-leaning conservatives have largely sided with the gay rights argument. Proud members of the “leave us alone” coalition were apt to side with a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to love the person they love (and what happens in the bedroom is nobody’s business).

At some point, however, “leave us alone” became “bake us a cake. Or else!”

And that’s a very different thing, altogether.

The reason conservative Christians are fighting this fight today is because it’s a firewall. The real danger, of course, is that Christian pastors and preachers will eventually be coerced into performing same-sex marriages. (Note: It is entirely possible for someone to believe gay marriage is fine, and to still oppose forcing people who hold strong religious convictions to participate — but I suspect that is where we are heading.)

Think of it this way. If you were a congregant in a church, wouldn’t you expect the pastor to marry you? Why should you be treated different?

Any pastor — if he or she wants to maintain the church’s tax status, that is — had better grapple with this now.

Whether the analogy is fair, or not, refusing to officiate a gay wedding can just as easily be called “denying service.” And it will predictably also be compared to the bad old days of Jim Crow — where racist Christians opposed interracial marriage (until the courts struck down state laws prohibiting biracial marriage).

Gay rights and religious liberty are on a collision course.

Read the whole thing.

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In England, the first lawsuit against the church is already in the news.

HuffPo:

A 36-year-old North Dakota woman who married herself in a commitment ceremony last March has now spoken about her self-marriage choice in an interview with Anderson Cooper.

The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged rings with her “inner groom.” …

The Fargo-based yoga teacher also takes herself on dates to treat herself and “to invest in this relationship”.

According to a local Fargo newspaper, Schweigert first got the unusual idea from a friend.

“I was waiting for someone to come along and make me happy,” Schweigert told Inforum. “At some point, a friend said, ‘Why do you need someone to marry you to be happy? Marry yourself.'”

Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time a woman has chosen to tie the knot solo. In 2010, a 30-year-old Taiwanese woman married herself.

Jack Donovan is apparently gay himself, but he does not buy in to all the Gay Marriage nonsense and he’s not afraid to speak the truth.

The simple fact is that gay marriage IS going to happen in the United States.

It’s not going to happen because it is good or rational. It’s going to happen because it really doesn’t matter, and it makes people feel good. Gay marriage is a good distraction, something silly and fun that Americans can agree to agree on even as social fractures widen over issues that do matter – like gun control, immigration, foreign policy and what to do about widespread economic and political corruption. It’s an issue that the progressive puppet media can congratulate Americans for coming ‘round on – as Time recently did. Americans want to feel like their opinion matters, and siding with a change that seems to be inevitable empowers them. Americans want to be on “the winning side of history,” a desire as cynical as it sounds.

Sure, average Americans have finally decided they are “OK” with gay marriage, but at least 12 million average Americans have watched Two and a Half Men every year for the past decade. The fact that Americans have decided something is “good enough” doesn’t actually make it ”good.”

While drones fill the skies and the police state expands, millions of TV tray head-nodders can congratulate themselves for being “forward thinking.”

As for the rest of us, as for the men who are left…well, what’s one more fucking gross indignity?

Right?

What’s one more vile, stupid thing?

What’s one more petty emasculation, one more mockery of everything our ancestors stood for?

What’s one more used condom in the landfill?

People who get mad about gay marriage still think they can fix all of this somehow. With their “vote” or something, I guess.

Me, I’m not mad. At least, I’m not mad at the stupid gays for acting like stupid gays. I mean, if gay men were known for acting like great and serious men, “faggot” wouldn’t be an insult. There are a handful of pretty respectable homos out there, but most gays are sadly “as advertised.” Expecting gays to stop throwing flamboyant tantrums is like expecting Irish men to drink whiskey in moderation.

One can always hope.

No, go ahead and throw one more shit-stained rubber in the landfill. Maybe that will be the one. Or maybe it won’t. I don’t care anymore if gays get married in this society, because what I am really looking forward to is this society’s collapse. I want to see their Candyland, upside-down rainbow dyke future destroyed.

Read the whole thing.

Detail, Thomas Couture, Les Romains de la décadence [Romans in the Period of Decadence], 1847, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Ron Dreher, back in April, explained the battle over Same Sex Marriage cuts very deeply into the culture, about as deeply as its possible to go.

What makes our own era different from the past, says [Philip] Rieff [in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)], is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.

How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

A must read.

Photoshopped version of: Vasili Pukiriev, Неравный брак [The Unfitting Marriage], 1862

An inclination toward, and willingness to participate in, perverted sexual acts does not really endow morally feeble and psychologically defective people with membership in a category of society carrying with it special recognition and privileges.

There is no such thing as a “Gay.” There are only perverted sexual acts. Gay is a fake, artificially-constructed category padded out with all sorts and forms of deviance and abnormality: with sissies, with psychologically-damaged and socially-maladapted persons obsessed with envy of the opposite sex, i.e., transvestites and female impersonsators, with pedophiles, fetishists, and with persons who are sexually stimulated by self-abasement. In Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria, for instance, there were “more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seem[ed] to distinguish among them. The sexual provender [was] staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place.” The ranks of the suppositious Gay identity are filled with neurotics, neurasthenics, eccentrics, the rebellious young, females disappointed in love, persons desperate for some form of self-distinction, dabblers, experimenters, and fellow travelers, debauchees, trend-seekers, self-destroyers and substance-abusers. They are so desperate for numbers that they have even added to their “LGBT” self-styled designation people who mutilate their bodies and ingest the hormones of the opposite sex.

If membership in a culture best noted for offering oral sexual services to strangers in public lavatories entitles you to have the government invent a parody version of marriage just for you, why shouldn’t fishing pals, business associates, bowling team members, bridge partnerships, drinking buddies, and people who counterfeit money or rob banks together not also receive federal benefits? If sodomy is worthy of federal recognition, approval, and protection, why not polygamy, bestiality, and incest? There are doubtless people in California who want group marriages and others who want to marry objects of public infrastructure and redwood trees. On what logical basis can they now possibly be denied?

If indulgence in vice makes you special and gives you status and privileges, why are only sodomites being so favored? Alcoholism is commonly considered to be an inheritable infirmity. Like the homosexual, the boozehound has no choice about his inclinations. Clearly, Anthony Kennedy ought to sit down and find some appellate case to which he can arrange cert, and start drafting his opinion that rumdums are equal, too, and cannot be denied their rights to employment or to driving vehicles.

We obviously live in a society led around by the nose by an elite which is too stupid to live. Any appeal to emotion and sentimentality will reduce even the learned Supreme Court Justice, nominated by a Republican and entrusted by Fate with the deciding vote, to the intellectual condition of a pubescent female in early high school who has been reading Black Beauty.

Ross Douthat predicts that Americans’ future liberty of conscience will be dependent on liberal magnanimity, and wonders (characteristically) if surrendering now might produce better terms.

Unless something dramatic changes in the drift of public opinion, the future of religious liberty on these issues is going to depend in part on the magnanimity of gay marriage supporters — the extent to which they are content with political, legal and cultural victories that leave the traditional view of marriage as a minority perspective with some modest purchase in civil society, versus the extent to which they decide to use every possible lever to make traditionalism as radioactive in the America of 2025 as white supremacism or anti-Semitism are today. And I can imagine a scenario in which a more drawn-out and federalist march to “marriage equality in 50 states,” with a large number of (mostly southern) states hewing to the older definition for much longer than the five years that gay marriage advocates currently anticipate, ends up encouraging a more scorched-earth approach to this battle, with less tolerance for the shrinking population of holdouts, and a more punitive, “they’re getting what they deserve” attitude toward traditionalist religious bodies in particular. If religious conservatives are, in effect, negotiating the terms of their surrender, it’s at least possible that those negotiations would go better if they were conducted right now, in the wake of a Roe v. Wade-style Supreme Court ruling, rather than in a future where the bloc of Americans opposed to gay marriage has shrunk from the current 44 percent to 30 percent or 25 percent, and the incentives for liberals to be magnanimous in victory have shrunk apace as well.

I’m still editing my own opinion, taking out all the epithets and toning down the pejoratives.

We are just in the throes of a great revolt against marriage, a passionate revolt against its ties and restrictions. …

[E]verybody, pretty well, takes it for granted that as soon as we can find a possible way out of it, marriage will be abolished. The Soviet abolishes marriage: or did. If new ‘modern’ states spring up, they will certainly follow suit. They will try to find some social substitute for marriage, and abolish the hated bond of conjugality. State support of motherhood, state support of children, and independence of women. It is on the programme of every great scheme of reform. And it means, of course, the abolition of marriage. …

[T]he first element of union is the Christian world is the marriage-tie. The marriage-tie, the marriage bond, take it which way you like, is the fundamental connecting link in Christian society. Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State which existed before the Christian era. …

Perhaps the greatest contribution to the social life of man made by Christianity is — marriage. Christianity brought marriage into the world: marriage as we know it. Christianity established the little economy of the family within the greater rule of the State. Christianity made marriage in some respects inviolate, not to be violated by the State. It is marriage, perhaps, which has given man the best of his freedom, given him his little kingdom of his own within the big kingdom of the State, given him his foothold of independence on which to stand and resist the unjust State. Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is a true freedom because it is a true fulfillment, for man, woman, and children.

Do we want to break marriage? If we do break it, it means we all fall to a far greater extent under the direct sway of the State. Do we want to fall under the direct sway of the State, any State? For my part, I don’t.

—Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1931.

Gay Marriage Equality symbol used on social media

Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958, Tate Gallery

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a “meaning” in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the “in vain,” insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure—being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long.—This meaning could have been: the “fulfillment” of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world order; or the growth of love and harmony in the intercourse of beings; or the gradual approximation of a state of universal happiness; or even the development toward a state of universal annihilation—any goal at least constitutes some meaning. What all these notions have in common is that something is to be achieved through the process—and now one realizes that becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.— Thus, disappointment regarding an alleged aim of becoming as a cause of nihilism: whether regarding a specific aim or, universalized, the realization that all previous hypotheses about aims that concern the whole “evolution” are inadequate (man no longer the collaborator, let alone the center, of becoming).

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not “true,” is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into the world—we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Quoted directly from Fred Lapides.