The Graeco-Egyptian deity Serapis is commonly depicted wearing a modius (a sort of Egyptian headgear favored by Elusinian deities). Roman copy after a Greek original from the 4th century BC, stored in the Serapaeum of Alexandria. Vatican Museum

The argument that there exists a supposed “right to marry” currently in some cases unfulfilled is clearly specious. In the first place, everyone in the United Stated already enjoys exactly the same right to marry right now. What some people are demanding is not the opportunity to marry, which they already possess. What they are demanding is the right to redefine marriage and the recognition of the state of other kinds of associations (the sort they desire) as the same thing as marriage, and as marriage’s moral and social equal.

The proposition that the association of a pair of persons of the same sex is just as good, just as valuable to society, just as morally acceptable as marriage is unquestionably a controversial proposition, and one from which a very large portion of the population of the United States would dissent. It is about as good a case as you could possibly find of a matter of theoretical moral and religious opinion on which rational men of good will are inevitably going to differ.

The American tradition is one of pluralism and we are theoretically constitutionally committed to state neutrality on issues of religious faith and morals. So, the real question ought to be: what is the authentically neutralist position that the state ought to be taking on the practice of same sex marriage?

It is widely agreed that the state has no right to enforce traditional religious morality or to interfere with the voluntary and private actions of consenting adults. And that is the status quo. No liberty of association of same sex couples is currently being infringed. No one is stopping them from living together. No one is interfering with their sexual relations. No one is even preventing them from conducting whatever sort of ceremonies of mutual commitment they desire, or preventing them from describing themselves within their own circles as married. The same sex marriage offensive is not really aimed at gaining for same sex couples the ability to file joint tax statements or the other practical benefits of matrimony. If insurance coverage, pension benefits, and joint tax returns were really the issue, we would be discussing some kind of civil union arrangements and the level of controversy and heat of argument would be very different.

What same sex couples want, however, is not really something practical. What they want is the Same Sex equivalent of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. They want federally-enforced moral and social equality. They want the government on their side, enforcing their worldview and their moral perspective on everybody else.

Same sex marriage advocates refer routinely to “Marriage Equality,” but no system of real equality allows someone who is actually not equal to someone else in specific characteristics pertaining to any kind of special conventionally recognized status to simply change the definition in order to gain access to prestige and privileges associated with that status for which he is not qualified.

On the contrary, the ability to modify the fundamental definition of an important institution to benefit oneself is really not “Equality” at all. It is actually a most extraordinary kind of special power and privilege, not normally accessible or available to anyone.

The spectacular inequality characteristic of the contest for “Marriage Equality” can even be seen in the history of the case currently before the Supreme Court. In California, in 2004, the mayor of San Francisco simply set aside state law and began issuing same sex wedding licenses. In doing so, he deliberately ignored a statute passed by the State Legislature in 1977, and a ballot initiative (Proposition 22) passed by a margin of 61.4% in 2000. The State Supreme Court, however, in 2008, intervened to rule, In re Marriage Cases, in favor of Same Sex Marriage. Which, in turn, produced Proposition 8, another ballot initiative in which Californians affirmed their opposition to state recognition of Same Sex Marriage.

In the entire history of the matter, we find a special interest group (the Same Sex community) allied with the national community of fashion elite determined, by hook or by crook, to have their way.

What the issue really revolves around is the determination of the national elite to impose its own faith and morals position coercively, using government, on everybody else.

Same Sex Marriage advocates are particularly fond of attacking a strawman argument, and pointing out that recognizing Same Sex Marriage does not practically impact traditional marriages. They would be indignant, I am sure, if I were to note in reply, that Same Sex Marriage does, however, insult and demean, by travestying traditional marriage, by the imitation of its form, and the usurpation of its honorable status by that which is not honorable.

A fraudulent libertarian argument commonly used tries to contend that no one else is injured if Same Sex couples are recognized by the state as married.

Suppose, just for example, that another wonderful new species of Enlightenment swept the land, and that the intelligentsia, the international elite, Hollywood, the mainstream media, and, what Vito Corleone used to call the Pezzonovante all suddenly converted to the Hellenic and Elusinian cult of Serapis. You and I might continue to think in terms of Christmas and Easter, and all that, but Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the presidents of Yale and Harvard, the editorial board of the New York Times, Sean Penn, Tina Fey, Oprah Winfrey, and the rest were all now mad keen worshipers of the god Serapis. And now they want the image of Serapis placed on the US dollar bill in the place of the portrait of George Washington.

It would just be a small concession of Elusinian Equality. Who would it hurt? Only the uncharitable and mean-spirited could possibly deny a school of thought discriminated against for two thousand years its basic dignity.

The headlines were filled recently with gleeful liberal accounts of spaghetti-spined members of the GOP, Charles Murray and Rob Portman, advocating surrender to the left on culture issues like Same Sex Marriage.

What we are obviously seeing is the herd mentality of the community of fashion in operation.

The Left controls most engines of opinion-formation in this country. First, revolutionary proposals originate in the left’s radical fringe, then little by little, they are “bravely” embraced by one pillar of the establishment after another. When it becomes apparent that the looney tunes running American education have successfully brainwashed the lumpenstudenten mob of impressionable, emotionally volatile, and fashion-conscious young, what we experience next is the unbecoming spectacle of older non-rugged-individualists scurrying to catch up with the departing bus of fashionable opinion which they perceive as about to motor through the endpoint of success, leaving behind History’s losers.

The truth of the matter is that you do not win culture war contests with the revolutionary Left by surrendering on point after point as soon as the Left appears to be gaining the upper hand. Even when they are going to win this particular battle today, it behooves Republicans and conservatives to recognize that revolutionary victories do not necessarily last forever. People living in France are not counting how many days of Ventôse remain before the arrival of Germinal.

Absurd leftist overreach may temporarily gain ascendancy and make entire societies dance to its tune, but the worst and the silliest of the Left’s ideas will always be doomed to fall in the end of their own weight of stupidity and falsehood.

In the meantime, we ought not to be like the French Army, offering the future surplus sale of MAS rifles described as “never fired, and only dropped once.” We ought to face the Left on every culture wars issue the way the doomed Spartans faced the Persians at Thermopylae. We should not cut and run, like Godric at the Battle of Maldon, but should, like Brythold, resist every time on every point to the bitter end.

“Hige sceal þe heardra,
heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare,
þe ure mægen lytlað.

“Mind must be the harder,
heart the keener
Spirit shall be greater –
as our strength lessens.”

Young people grow up. The Left’s domination of the Dummer Junger student and recent graduate crowd does not in most cases last forever.

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Molly Hemingway, at Ricochet, pointed out just how worthwhile Rob Portman’s analysis really is.

Leaving apart the question of whether marriage law should be changed, this strikes me as a problematic approach. I mean, marriage law should be changed or it shouldn’t be changed — but it shouldn’t hinge on the sexual attractions of one senator’s son, should it?

What if a conservative senator said, “I’m reversing my views on whether abortion should be legal because my daughter got pregnant and wished she weren’t.”

One of the fascinating things about society today is that personal experience trumps everything else in argumentation. Very few people seem to care about fundamental truths and principles while everyone seems to care about personal experience and emotion. It’s the Oprahfication of political philosophy.

Should a conservative determine good policy this way?

The always-combative Ann Coulter takes on John Stossel before an audience of liberaltarian kiddies, whose prime issues happen to be legalized pot and Gay Marriage.

I’m a libertarian myself, and entirely in favor of abolishing all drug laws, but I do agree with Ann Coulter that there are currently larger issues under contention. I also agree with her that soi disant “libertarians” today far too commonly are a lot more interested in cosying up to the left-wing community of fashion on social issues than fighting against Socialism and Statism. I think she is quite right in calling them pussies.

As to Gay Marriage, Coulter is again perfectly right. Universal Marriage Equality currently exists. Everyone has exactly the same right to marry as anybody else.

It is not “equality” to redefine a fundamental institution in order to gratify the fantasies and pretensions of a subculture self-organised on the basis of a shared penchant for participating in sexually perverted activities.

Gay Marriage is not about equality. It is about securing formal recognition and approval of sexual perversity by government and making the moral and social equality of inversion enforceable by the state. And, like Ann Coulter, my own position is to hell with that. The rest of us may owe the sodomitically-inclined tolerance of private activities involving consenting adults, but we do not owe them public approval or the coercive modification of the moral opinions of American society in general.

One wishes this debate had been better-formatted and more substantive, but Coulter’s “take no prisoners” approach is always fun to watch.

Some wag photoshopped the 1862 painting by Vasili Pukiriev, Неравный брак [The Unequal Marriage].

George Will, on ABC News recently, did everything but sing Hallelujah to the river gods as civilization appeared ready to slide another long mile downstream, with the Supreme Court announcing its intention to intervene in the culture wars conflict over Same Sex Marriage in the grim immediate aftermath of the 2012 election.

While Supreme Court watchers ponder how justices will come down in the debate over gay marriage, ABC’s George Will said Sunday on ABC News “This Week” it’s clear where public opinion is headed.

“There is something like an emerging consensus,” Will said, noting voters in three states recently endorsed same-sex marriage initiatives. [emphasis added] “Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old people.”

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Why, I wonder, is George Will apparently surprised that young people are so commonly successfully-brainwashed subscribers to establishment community of fashion articles of faith, like the principle that no mere theory should ever be allowed to stand in the way of immediate individual personal gratification, or the even more important principle that Equality is the utmost supreme value transcending all other values?

It always looks exactly this way in every culture wars battle. Young people care nothing for theories and tradition and everything for fashionable opinion and being nice.

But Mr. Will overlooks a couple of important considerations.

Young people inevitably grow older and gain experience and most of them recover from the illusions with which they were indoctrinated during their school years. Time is not really on the side of the progressive left. Conservatives and sane rational people do not just grow old, die off, and become extinct, leaving behind a Saturnalia of progressive fantasy. What really happens is that each generation of dummer jungen gradually matures, turning from radicals and fashionistas into sober and responsible burgesses, tax payers, and adults. The gleeful supporters of free love and transgressive sex turn into censorious grey-haired married couples with children of their own.

In the end, you simply wind up with the repetition of the comedy of a society always divided nearly evenly between the party of the young, the radical, and the stupid and the party of the adults.

We have a serious problem in America in having allowed too many important institutions to fall into the hands of an unworthy and only-superficially-intelligent intelligentsia. But we do not need to despair.

George Will obviously spends too much of his time in the fantasy cocoon of media culture. He has succumbed to believing in the left’s narrative of the grand march of Progress, of the inevitable and irreversible movement of society in the direction of coercive egalitarianism, materialism, and statism.

George Will has forgotten the first thing any conservative ought to remember. Magna est veritas et prævalebit. (“The truth is mighty and it shall prevail.” The Revolutionary Convention may renumber the calendar and change the name of the months to “the windy one” and “the rainy one,” an infatuated majority of supreme court justices may decide that the intention of the framers guarantees the sacramental equality of sexual perversion, but History will go on, and absurdities, grotesqueries, and the wild excesses of human folly and obsession over time typically fall of their own weight. Later generations laugh at the Victorian sexual pudeur that once installed skirts on piano legs, and succeeding generations will similarly marvel at the extravagantly bizarre positions so many in our own era were driven to by the current dementia founded upon egalitarianism.

There has never, in the entire history of the human race, been any society or culture that regarded homosexual attraction as a basis for lifelong monogamous relations or which looked upon the sterile couplings of members of the same sex as worthy of the dignity of recognition as equivalent to normal marriage.

Today’s moral breakdown and intellectual disorder may possibly lead to the official proclamation of such absolute nonsense as the new law of the land, but the left’s fools and demoniacs can never possibly in the long run succeed in establishing permanently so preposterously-based an institution as Same Sex Marriage.

The Thinking Housewife comments on another of those dramatic symbolic moments in the left’s forcible conversion of America.

I read yesterday the news stories about the first same-sex wedding ceremony at West Point’s chapel and was completely uninterested. This “wedding” between two elderly lesbians, whose enormous smiles belie an immense disdain for our heritage and for civilization itself, was news around the country but it is not news. It’s just another all-too-predictable ceremony of the liberal state. These two women, and homosexuality itself, are convenient characters in the drama. These uplifted swords, with their evocation of America’s martial past, and this Gothic chapel, with its reference to the fortress of Christianity, are magnificent props. They serve in the most theatrical way to affirm the power of the liberal state and to proclaim its victory. It has conquered our most treasured institutions. It has stolen right up to the foot of the altar. Liberalism has defeated the greatest competing authorities to itself: traditional morality, masculine initiative and the family. It has defeated God himself. This wedding is an assertion of power. There have been many like it for years and there must be more and more ceremonies of its kind. For the forces liberalism has conquered are the forces of life itself.

Don’t miss the comments.

These days Barack Obama looks like he’s channeling Herbert Hoover, but Arnold Goldstein thinks he may really have more in common with Grover Cleveland.

[L]et’s say Obama loses in November. He has a ready made excuse for his defeat. Obama can say that the forces of darkness (i.e. opponents of gay marriage) are to blame for his defeat while patting himself on the back for his “courage” in supporting same sex marriage. It also helps to position him for a comeback in 2016 or 2020. Make no mistake. If Obama loses this fall it won’t be the last we see of him. By that time with a greater presence of voters born after 1980 chances are there will be more voters in favor of gay marriage which would give Obama an opportunity to claim he was ahead of the curve.

So while Obama might have come out in favor of gay marriage far sooner than he wanted to do so. But now that he has come out of the closet on the issue it could work to his advantage if not in this election then perhaps in the next one or the one after that.

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James Pethokoukis thinks the same thing.

Might Obama try to grab the nomination in 2016 and take another crack at Romney?

1. Obama, always trim and fit, would be only 55 on Election Day 2016.

2. Obama would likely still have a deep reservoir of support among key Democratic interest groups including (most importantly) African Americans, gays, young voters, and the educated elite.

3. Many Democrats might be inclined to give an historic president a second chance, reasoning he was dealt an impossibly bad economic hand by George W. Bush. “Bush got two terms, and Obama just one? Please.”

4. While there could potentially be some big name rivals in 2016, including Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, none seem as formidable as Ronald Reagan was to Ford in 1980.

5. The economy the next four years could be pretty rough thanks to high levels of U.S. debt and a possible eurozone implosion. The Obama years might be subject to some positive revisionist history by a friendly media. And as one gloomy economic analyst told me recently, “Whichever party wins the White House in 2012 won’t win again for 20 years.”

I can see that 2016 Obama-Warren ticket already …

The bad news is that they’re right: he could very possibly come back and try running again. The good news is: we’re already sitting around contemplating Obama losing in November as the most probable outcome.

Hat tip to Jim Geraghty.

Hat tip to Darlene Meader Riggs and Clarice Feldman.

The New York Times’ idea of a conservative, Harvard-man Ross Douthat warmly defends the practice of the establishment community of fashion elite “using every means at its disposal short of banning speech outright” to coercively change American culture and the private views and opinions of Americans generally in directions it deems more enlightened.

Douthat is nowhere nearly as offended as such liberals as Kevin Drum, Andrew Sullivan, and Glenn Greenwald by quasi-legal harassment of heretics by politicians on the fashionable side.

[Glenn] Greenwald wrote:

As always, the solution to noxious ideas like the ones from this chicken CEO are to rebut them, not use state power to suppress them. The virtue of gay equality has become increasingly recognized in the U.S. because people have been persuaded of its merits, not because state officials, acting like Inquisitors, forced people to accept it by punishing them for their refusal.

Greenwald and I have been over this ground a bit before, so I’ll say again what I said then: This is an idealized view of how cultures change, and it doesn’t acknowledge the link between law and culture, and the crucial role that [emphasis added -jdz] stigma, harassment and legal sanctions can play in changing attitudes and behavior. The cause of gay marriage has indeed advanced because many millions of people have been persuaded of its merits: No cause could move so swiftly from the margins to the mainstream if it didn’t have appealing arguments supporting it and powerful winds at its back. But it has also advanced, and will probably continue to advance, through social pressure, ideological enforcement, and legal restriction. Indeed, the very language of the movement is explicitly designed to exert this kind of pressure: By redefining yesterday’s consensus view of marriage as “bigotry,” and expanding the term “homophobia” to cover support for that older consensus as well as personal discomfort with/animus toward gays, the gay marriage movement isn’t just arguing with its opponents; it’s pathologizing them, raising the personal and professional costs of being associated with traditional views on marriage, and creating the space for exactly the kind of legal sanctions that figures like Thomas Menino and Rahm Emanuel spent last week flirting with.

This reality is not a judgment on the cause of gay marriage itself. Many admirable causes, including the cause of civil rights for African-Americans, have advanced through a similar legal and social redefinition of what constitutes acceptable opinion, and obviously gay people have historically been the victims, rather than the victimizers, where the human tendency to use law and custom to pathologize difference and marginalize dissent from respectable opinion is concerned. But it’s naive to think that gay marriage is only winning because of the power of sweet reason, and that the climate created by the bluster of figures like Menino and Emanuel isn’t a big part of the story as well. When David Blankenhorn, heretofore one of the leading critics of same-sex marriage, wrote last month that he was “bending the knee” on the issue, it was an explicit nod to this reality: Causes advance by persuading people to change their minds, but they win their final, sweeping victories by inducing people who haven’t really changed their mind to simply give up the fight. And there’s no surer way to gain that kind of victory than by adding legal hassles — or even just the threat of legal hassles — to the list of reasons why the fight isn’t worth having anymore.

The Jesuits used to say: if the ends are lawful, so are the means lawful. Obviously many prominent representatives of our elite establishment agree, and consider themselves empowered on the basis of their own allegedly superior moral insight to forcibly cram any change in morals, culture, faith, or opinion that they believe to be desirable right down the throats of their less powerful and influential fellow citizens, because they can and because it makes them feel so righteous and so powerful.

George Weigel explains that there is nothing libertarian about a state modifying the definition of marriage.

That what the New York state legislature approved has to be described, not as marriage, but as “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” is itself a verbal indicator that what is being done here is counterintuitive. We all know, or thought we knew, what marriage is, and to add the qualifier “gay” or “same-sex” is a tacit admission by the proponents of the practice that it requires an appeal to authority to enforce what seems strange, odd, not right. The verbal tic of “gay marriage” or “same-sex” marriage is thus itself a rhetorical warning sign that what was done in Albany was an exercise in raw state power, the state’s asserting that it can do X simply because it claims that it has the power to do so.

And that is an exercise of power that libertarians ought, in theory, to resist, not support.

New York State notwithstanding, the argument over marriage will and must continue, because it touches first principles of democratic governance — and because resistance to the agenda of the gay-marriage lobby is a necessary act of resistance against the dictatorship of relativism, in which coercive state power is used to impose on all of society a relativistic ethic of personal willfulness. In conducting that argument in the months and years ahead, it would be helpful if the proponents of marriage rightly understood would challenge the usurpation by the proponents of gay marriage of the civil-rights trump card.

That usurpation is at the heart of the gay lobby’s emotional, cultural, and political success — the moral mantle of those Freedom Riders whose golden anniversary we mark this year has, so to speak, been successfully claimed by the Stonewall Democratic Club and its epigones. And because the classic civil-rights movement and its righteous demand for equality before the law remains one of the few agreed-upon moral touchstones in 21st-century American culture (another being the Holocaust as an icon of evil), to seize that mantle and wear it is to have won a large part of the battle — as one sees when trying to discuss these questions with otherwise sensible young people.

But the analogy simply doesn’t work. Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause.

Read the whole thing.

The action of the New York legislature is as revolutionary a gesture as the alteration of the calendar and the names of the months by the French Convention. What distinguishes this example of revolutionary action from those of the past, however, is the fact that the Revolution is being conducted by the ruling class against the people.

The establishment of Gay Marriage is another of a series of symbolic aggressions and assaults by the privileged, well-educated, and influential against the culture, values, and beliefs of ordinary Americans. The American elite has simply chosen to exercise the contemporary equivalent of le droit du seigneur with the sacrament of marriage as its victim. Our rulers are once again demonstrating in the most dramatic possible manner the power of the establishment community of fashion to violate the most cherished cultural institutions and traditions of the plebians at will.

FrankJ: Deciding for yourself whether you should be allowed to eat transfats is a right, marriage isn’t.