“A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull
everything down,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard, “but a revolutionary age
that is at the same time reflective and passionless leaves
everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.”
Something like this seems to be happening in California. In the
heat of revolutionary fervor, California’s leftists once called for
the abolition of marriage, which they regarded as an “outmoded” and
“oppressive” tradition. But these days they praise marriage as a
hallowed institution while they harness it to their original
destructive purposes.
What the open radicalism of the 1960s sought to accomplish
overtly its more circumspect successors achieve subtly, leaving
state marriage standing but trivializing and discrediting it. The
Golden state that first took a cudgel to marriage with no-fault
divorce takes a final swipe with same-sex marriage.
“Many gay activists are likening the moment to the 1967 Summer
of Love, when young people from across the country converged on
California in what came to be regarded as the birth of the
counterculture,” reports the Associated Press. That sounds about
right: the 1960s counterculture has largely become the culture, and
marriage as defined by the California Supreme Court has been
reduced to nothing more significant than a Flower Children love
ceremony in Golden Gate Park.
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, however, made sure to select
for his 2008 Summer of Love the least representative couple
possible to launch it: “a pair of octogenarian lesbians,” as Mary
McNamara of the Los Angeles Times put it, allowing that she “couldn’t help
thinking that they were chosen because their age made them so
adorable.” “Gay and lesbian activist groups,” she added, “reviewed
the tapes from four years ago and made it clear to their
constituents that sometimes less is more, especially when it comes
to cross-dressing.”
Having been softened up by years of widespread “domestic
partnerships” and gay-rights propaganda sloshing through the public
schools, Californians didn’t seem all that fazed on Tuesday.
According to AP, “a recent Field Poll showed that Californians
favor granting gays the right to marry 51 percent to 42 percent. It
was the first time in 30 years of California polling that the
scales tipped in that direction.”
But the implications of the counterculture worming its way into
the heart of the state may get their attention over time. Since gay
marriage now enjoys the highest level of state approval, anyone who
opposes homosexual behavior becomes in effect an opponent of the
state. The California justices promised that their ruling would not
“impinge upon the religious freedom of any religious organization,
official or any other person,” but obviously it will, as the trend
of recent years, in which courts have stamped out religious liberty
in the name of the state’s notion of “equality,” is sure to
accelerate after gay marriage.
MEANWHILE, THE OPPOSITION to gay marriage seems depressingly wan,
as a note of agnosticism about the immorality of homosexual
behavior saps its drive. The case against gay marriage ultimately
rests on the natural moral law, but Republicans and conservatives
seem to consider that too passe or embarrassing to be useful in the
debate. Yet without that philosophical basis, the case against gay
marriage appears arbitrary and strained.
“Pragmatic” arguments haven’t proven very practical. Nor have
“pragmatic” concessions to the homosexual movement done anything to
forestall gay marriage. If anything, granting benefits, civil
unions, domestic partnerships, etc. didn’t slow the gay-marriage
juggernaut down but sped it up.
The California media, looking around for a visible opponent to
gay marriage, had to settle on Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los
Angeles. But his opposition to gay marriage isn’t very reassuring.
A good chunk of his statement was devoted to extolling benefits for
homosexual couples: “Some benefits currently sought by same-sex
partners can already be obtained without regard to marital
status….Other desired benefits such as sharing in a partner’s
health insurance could be made available without the drastic step
of a cultural or legal redefinition of marriage.”
Implicit in all these previous concessions was an acceptance of
homosexuality that made the state’s full embrace of it in gay
marriage inevitable. Negotiating with the gay-rights movement at
this point is obtuse. The revolutionary path blazed by the Summer
of Love has terminated in the Summer of gay marriage, and there is
no turning back unless the issue is engaged at a deeper level than
politics.
