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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDavid Brooks’s Gay-Marriage Delusion
There have been all manner of conservative responses to the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage, from John Robertss sulking about gay power to Ross Douthats laugh-if-you-will-but-marriage-is-collapsing line to startled acceptance of gay childrenor, in the case of Senator Mark Kirk, who announced his support Tuesday, the crediting of a near-death experienceto bitter rejectionism (something George Packer writes about over at Daily Comment). And then there is David Brooks, who examines the situation and is pleased to discover that gays and lesbians have quite misunderstood what they are doingwhich is, in short, to prove that David Brooks is right about the world, and that they, until now, have been wrong.
I dont think weve paused sufficiently to celebrate the wonderful recent defeat for the cause of personal freedom, Brooks begins his column, under the headline FREEDOM LOSES ONE. He then details how the balance between freedom and restraint has been thrown out of whack, and how the Supreme Courts willingness to entertain the question of same-sex marriage represented a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. Because marriage restricts freedom. And thus a representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. Is he under the impression that the Court is being asked to order a mass shotgun wedding? Otherwise, how does he think that gaining the option to marry means having fewer choices?
This is the musing of the prince who thinks that the pauper is so much more free than he isso lucky to be spared your aunts questions about when you are going to get married. It is blind to what those questions, or the lack of them, have really meant in peoples lives, as if there was no pain or reflection or growing old, no days when someone was turned away from visiting a hospital room. Brooks treats gays and lesbians, en masse, like hedonistic teenagers who hes pleased to see have just grown up.
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But first, its worth challenging Brookss central, blind assertion: that marriage equality represents a move from a state in which gays and lesbians lived free to one in which they are constrainedfrom an absence of state supervision to life under societys careful watch. Unsupervised and hidden are hardly the same thing. Brooks sees the bathhouses as if there were never raids on them, or as if gays and lesbians had all chosen anonymous settings over the option of holding hands while walking on the street just because they liked dark rooms better. The discovery that even in the most oppressive of circumstances one can create spaces where love survives does say a great deal about the indomitable search for freedom, but to call it freedoms apotheosis is just absurd.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/04/david-brookss-gay-marriage-delusion.html#ixzz2PRRA7piN
tularetom
(23,664 posts)Except maybe Thomas Friedman. And neither of them has anything worthwhile to say.