Sunday March 24, 2013 7:27 AM
Just because things can be put on the same list doesn’t mean
they necessarily are similar. My attic contains within it thousands of
comic books, an inflatable bed, some jigsaw puzzles, some family
pictures and a
Frampton Comes Alive! album. These things are, roughly speaking, in the same location, but they’re hardly of equal value, importance or function.
I bring this up for the simple reason that we’re hearing a lot about
how the GOP must deal with “abortion and gay marriage,” as if they are
almost the same issue.
Well, in my house, I hear about my dog and my mortgage a lot.
They’re both important, and complicated in their own ways, but they aren’t all that similar.
I think some liberals and some conservatives like to lump all social
issues together, at least in part because they find their opponents’
positions on them so unfathomable. It’s like if an alien showed you a
fnerk, a thrampahorn and a zizzenbozzle, you’d be forgiven for assuming
they’re all somehow related to each other.
In fact, for a long time the shorthand for social issues was “God,
guns and gays.” And a lot of analysts thought they would move all
together. It turns out that various social issues stand or fall on their
own.
If you’d predicted in the late 1980s that the country would become
more pro-life, more pro-gun and more pro-gay, the experts would’ve
laughed at you.
It drives some older liberals crazy that some young liberals are
insufficiently pro-choice and it vexes some older conservatives that
some young conservatives are insufficiently anti-gay-marriage.
I myself have grown both more pro-life and more sympathetic to gay marriage.
I’ve been in favor of civil unions for more than a decade — back when
it was considered a left-wing position, not a fallback right-wing one.
And I’d probably still prefer civil unions if we had settled on some
arrangement that conferred the economic and legal benefits of
traditional marriage without calling it marriage. Still, gays have an
entirely understandable reluctance to settle for that and, besides, I
think the argument over whether or not to call civil unions “marriage”
has been all but lost, though there’s a glimmer of hope the decision
might eventually be left to the states (which I favor).
As for abortion, my migration has less to do with religious arguments
and more to do with my growing distrust of the government. Who is and
who isn’t a human being with unalienable rights is just about the
biggest question there is. And the fact that the answer usually is
obvious — that guy, not that fly — only makes it more important.
The government has an obligation to protect the life and liberty of
the subset of human beings we call Americans. If you commit a crime that
obligation changes, of course, since the government also has an
obligation to protect the rest of us from those who would do us harm.
Well, I consider a fetus a human being. It has done no harm, nor has
it committed a crime punishable by death. More important, I don’t like
it when governments start getting clever about who counts as full human
beings and who doesn’t (See:
Slavery, U.S., or
Holocaust, Nazi).
There are few areas where a bright line is more vital or necessary. I’d
bet it won’t be very long before science is able to tell us whether
some fetuses will grow up to be gay or not. The politics of abortion
will suddenly get more interesting, I suspect.
But once you’re born and, hopefully, properly raised, the
government’s chief obligation is to stay out of your way, whether you’re
straight or gay, so you can pursue happiness as you define it — not
how, say, Michael Bloomberg or Pat Robertson define it.
Which brings me back to gay marriage. Opponents of same-sex marriage
insist gays have the same right as anyone else to marry a person of the
opposite sex. It’s a clever line, but it overlooks the fact that
romantic love has been the paramount reason for marriage for quite some
time. Telling people they’re free to be unhappy isn’t all that
persuasive.
The whole point of the American way is life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. So, come to think of it, maybe gay marriage and abortion
have more in common than I thought.
Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online.
jonahscolumn@aol.com
