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Massive Illogic

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The current crop of anti-gay bills in red states signals, to me at least, that the Republican Party has more or less accepted that the country is pretty much fine with the gays at this point and has figured out how to respond, in typical fashion. Obviously, there are various ways they could go about this. One would be to just give up, though the decreasing minority who opposes marriage equality seems highly reluctant to do so. Another would be to give up and declare victory, Vietnam style. One can even imagine a Scott Walker type saying something like, “Look, I got married to my wife in a church. I believe God was there and I know He approved. What do I care about what the state has to say about it? Marriage is a spiritual matter, the state’s recognition is just a bureaucratic detail. I’m a small-government Republican. I really couldn’t care less.” It seems to me at least somewhat possible that this logic could square the peg, but the problem again would be getting equality opponents to accept it, as they tend not to accept this nuance. In my personal experience they mostly complain a lot about how inevitably their church will be forced to perform gay weddings, though there seems to be virtually no interest (and no legal possibility) in doing so. They tend to see it all as one thing (The Institution Of Marriage), while secular liberals have little trouble in making the distinction between state and religion, with the latter being private and protected but the former a subject of contention. It’s possible they’ll suddenly find an interest in making the distinction when they have no choice, but who knows. Anyway, yet another strategy a couple of rungs down the ladder is to simply whine a lot about how your religious freedoms are being trampled upon because not everyone is doing what you tell them to, i.e. the Damon Linker strategy. But nobody really gives a damn about Linker and endless whining has some drawbacks as a strategy: as in, people just tune it out after a while.

The worst way to react to this, though, would be to pass the law that Arizona’s legislature has. The bill flat-out permits mistreatment of minorities for no justifiable reason, and what’s more, it once again shows the Republican Party to be one that cares only about the interests of business owners and has no capacity for empathy for anyone else at all. It feels like a gratuitous, spiteful swipe, which it no doubt is for a lot of these folks, but it’s almost bizarrely selfish and indefensible, terrible policy married to terrible politics, the product of an ossified and out of touch party network more interested in maintaining lucrative business connections than in doing what’s right. They might want to stop and take a breather, think if this is really the best way of advancing their interests, since opposing discrimination is something that virtually all Americans claim to support.


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