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cali

(114,904 posts)
Wed Apr 3, 2013, 06:20 PM Apr 2013

David Brooks’s Gay-Marriage Delusion

There have been all manner of conservative responses to the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage, from John Roberts’s sulking about gay power to Ross Douthat’s laugh-if-you-will-but-marriage-is-collapsing line to startled acceptance of gay children—or, in the case of Senator Mark Kirk, who announced his support Tuesday, the crediting of a near-death experience—to 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 doing—which is, in short, to prove that David Brooks is right about the world, and that they, until now, have been wrong.

“I don’t think we’ve 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 Court’s 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 is—so lucky to be spared your aunt’s 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 people’s 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 he’s pleased to see have just grown up.


<snip>


But first, it’s worth challenging Brooks’s 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 constrained—from an absence of state supervision to life under society’s 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 freedom’s apotheosis is just absurd.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/04/david-brookss-gay-marriage-delusion.html#ixzz2PRRA7piN

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David Brooks’s Gay-Marriage Delusion (Original Post) cali Apr 2013 OP
There have been more articles and posts wasted on David Brooks than any other columnist tularetom Apr 2013 #1

tularetom

(23,664 posts)
1. There have been more articles and posts wasted on David Brooks than any other columnist
Wed Apr 3, 2013, 06:49 PM
Apr 2013

Except maybe Thomas Friedman. And neither of them has anything worthwhile to say.

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