A liberal who calls himself a conservative is still a liberal.
Except to liberals. Since turning conservatism into an echo of
their own thoughts is job one for them, they are happy to describe
liberals who calls themselves conservatives as “conservative.”
The liberals at the New York Times, for example,
designate David Brooks as their “conservative” columnist, even as
he takes a position on homosexual marriage to the left of the
Democratic presidential field. “He’s every liberal’s favorite
conservative,” Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, said to
the New York Observer. “People were always stopping me,
saying that they liked his stuff,” said New York Times
editorial page editor Gail Collins. “There is something about him
— he’s like the conservative guy who can talk to liberals.”
In the Observer article, Brooks plays along with the game and accepts
the conservative label but says (in response to a question about
whether he might become a “leftist again”), “Sometimes I do think
that.…If I was with the Nation left, I’d be
depressed. If I was with the centrist-Joe Lieberman left, I’d be
happy.”
Brooks is already there, and perhaps past it, judging by his
Saturday column
on homosexual marriage. In it he makes a “conservative” case for a
radically liberal innovation most Democrats aren’t even heedless
enough to embrace.
Brooks’s case is not remotely conservative in its conclusion,
just in its moralizing tone. He sternly calls for monogamous
homosexuality. “We shouldn’t just allow gay marriage,” he writes.
“We should insist on gay marriage.” Call it the case for
straight-laced sin. (Demanding that homosexuals sin monogamously is
perhaps stringent conservatism for the Times.)
“Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing
spiritual suicide,” Brooks writes. “He or she is ripping the veil
from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing
it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.”
This sounds like St. Paul’s description of homosexual conduct,
but Brooks’s isn’t worried about the moral character of homosexual
acts, only their context. Outside of marriage they are bad for the
soul, according to his moral logic. Inside of homosexual marriage
they would be good for it. (St. Paul would be surprised to learn
that sin ceases to be “spiritual suicide” if done repetitively with
one person and with Caesar’s seal of approval.)
“We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim
to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with
marriage and fidelity,” writes Brooks. What’s the moral logic here?
That homosexuals can’t choose their sexuality but they can choose
lifelong fidelity? That’s a curious position for Brooks to take if
he is saying that homosexuals can’t help their inclinations. What
if they are inclined to be unfaithful? According to the moral
liberalism Brooks takes for granted as a starting point for the
discussion, homosexual inclinations and objects of desire aren’t to
be questioned, and certainly can’t be controlled. No, no, whatever
you are inclined to do you are entitled to do. (Since a substantial
number of people are bisexuals — and thus it must be a natural
condition, according to liberal logic — perhaps it is time for
Brooks to also make a “conservative” case for polygamy. Don’t
bisexuals need the stabilizing influence of marriage too?)
Brooks even suggests conservatives are duty bound to make the
case for homosexual marriage. It is “up to conservatives to make
the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not
making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency,
which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an
abomination.”
Homosexual marriage will stop the drift of our culture of
contingency? That would only be persuasive if homosexual culture
weren’t part and parcel of that culture of contingency. Homosexual
marriage will not stop the culture of contingency but bring it
deeper into an institution already suffering under it.
Brooks says that homosexual marriage will help to rebuild a
“culture of fidelity.” Fidelity to what? To God? To children? To
morality? How do you rebuild a culture of fidelity on infidelity to
fundamental moral laws?
Brooks says “some conservatives have latched onto biological
determinism” to oppose homosexual marriage. But he latches onto a
form of homosexual determinism to call on conservatives to
accommodate it with marriage (though his determinism is limited. He
uses it to justify homosexual marriage but forgets about it when
implying that homosexuals are capable of lifelong fidelity.)
In one of his earlier columns, Brooks approvingly wrote of Pope
John Paul II that he “is always taking us out of our secular
comfort zone and dragging us toward ultimate issues. You can’t talk
about politics, economics, science, philosophy or war, he argues,
while conveniently averting your eyes from God and ultimate
truth.”
Does Brooks think we should talk about redefining marriage while
conveniently averting our eyes from God and ultimate truth?
Wouldn’t his idea of marriage, as revealed in his design of the
human body, be a little more authoritative than current
fashion?
In this debate, we constantly hear about the rights of man. When
are we going to hear about the rights of God? Isn’t He entitled to
respect? The glibness and impiety displayed in the homosexual
marriage debate is unbelievable. One would think society was
debating country club memberships.
Brooks tries to elevate the tone of the debate but his
moralizing tone is odd in the context of what he is endorsing. To
say as he does that “we are not animals whose lives are bounded by
our flesh” and that we’re “moral creatures with souls, endowed with
the ability to make covenants,” sounds not like an argument for
homosexual marriage but against it.
It is “up to conservatives” not to join liberals in laying an ax
to the cornerstone of civilization in some deluded hope that a
marriage certificate will magically make homosexuals moral, but to
conserve the institution of marriage as established by God.
