Columnist Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post:
If you want to know why social conservatives have effectively lost the battle over same-sex marriage with the American people, you need look no further than former senator and now Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint.
She’s right that Heritage, while always wrong about gay rights, once could mount intelligent arguments; under Jim DeMint’s leadership, no more.
8 Comments for “Heritage Debased”
posted by Lori Heine on
Jim De Mint is an idiot. Social conservatives are becoming hysterical. They don’t even appear to care about trying to make sense anymore. All they’re doing is preaching to a rapidly shrinking choir.
posted by Houndentenor on
Social conservatives never made sense. It was their moderate apologists who did the heavy lifting in that regard. The moderates have abandoned them on gay rights and many other issues and now the curtain is pulled back. Nothing I hear from them is the least bit shocking to me. I’ve heard stupidity like this growing up in East Texas. This is the real unvarnished social conservative. This is what they were all along without the country club Republicans covering for them to make them sound less mean-spirited and bigoted. But that’s exactly what they are.
posted by Tom Scharbach on
Heritage, while always wrong about gay rights, once could mount intelligent arguments; under Jim DeMint’s leadership, no more.
Jim DeMint is, as Lorrie puts it, an idiot. Even Tony Perkins is a better salesman for anti-gay dreck than DeMint, and he’s no prize, to be sure. But at least Perkins smiles rather than snarls.
I think, though, that DeMint is more effect than cause of Heritage’s devolution into another organ of the anti-gay mob.
The anti-equality movement has a problem.
We are winning over the people who are moved by reasoned argument (including people whose opposition is religiously-based but who are able to make a distinction between religious marriage and civil law marriage and look objectively at the societal benefits of civil law marriage equality despite religious objection, so long as religious organizations are allowed to refuse to perform or recognize same-sex marriages for religious purposes). We are winning over the people who are moved by empathy with gay and lesbian family, friends, neighbors and co-workers, people who can see us for who we are and who have the imagination to walk in our shoes. We are winning over the formerly frightened, people who knew few of us and little about us, and who feared social upheaval, people who have lived with increasing equality on many fronts (marriage, workplace, military) and have come to realize that their fears were unfounded. Little by slowly, we are winning over the American people.
As we’ve won over the American people, the anti-equality movement has shrunk.
What is left, increasingly, are people who are not ruled by reasoned argument, empathy and realistic assessment, but by animus and/or irrational fear. Because the people who are left in the movement are less reasoned, and more hostile and/or frightened, it is inevitable that the rhetoric of the movement has become less reasoned, more hostile, and more irrationally fear-driven.
That’s where the anti-gay movement now stands. Absent a dramatic and unlikely shift in attitude that alters the long-standing trend toward acceptance of equal treatment, the anti-gay movement will continue devolution toward hostility and shrillness.
If that is where we have been and where we are headed — and I think that it is — then Jim DeMint’s take-over at Heritage was both inevitable and predictive. He’s not changed. What has changed is the anti-gay movement.
posted by Houndentenor on
As much as I’d like to think that gay people are winning the argument by making the best case, the reality is that our ad campaigns on these ballot initiatives tend to be awful. It’s not that we are winning, it’s that the anti-gay bigots, no longer carefully toning down the animus in their comments, have sent moderates and libertarians running, screaming to our side of the debate. We didn’t win it; the social conservatives lost it.
As for DeMint, he was always like this. I don’t see any change.
posted by Lori Heine on
An additional problem for bigots is that the religious argument cuts both ways. A growing number of churches and synagogues accept gays on equal terms with straights. A growing number of believers in traditional religious creeds are of the opinion that it is bigotry — rather than same-sex love — that is sinful.
The anti-gay argument is no longer THE argument for all people of faith. Even traditional faith. The bigots’ kingdom keeps shrinking.
posted by Doug on
We are winning not because we are making a better case, we are winning because we have ‘come out’ and people, friends, family and coworkers, realize that we are no different than anyone else. We are not the monsters we were portrayed as when so many were in the closet. We are flesh and blood neighbors, friends, family who are just like everyone else.
posted by Houndentenor on
That’s true up to a point. Then there’s Chief Justice Roberts who invited his lesbian cousin to observe the oral arguments in the DOMA case and then ruled to uphold it anyway. Some people are obviously indifferent to the human rights of anyone but themselves, even relatives and friends.
posted by Don on
It doesn’t matter what the topic is, there is always a faction in every society that adopts innovations early, a large middle that adopts more slowly, and a small faction that never adopts them. Whether its new electronic gadgets or social change, it is a question of temperament along the human continuum.
We are not immune to this fact of societies. And that doesn’t mean people are mean or bigoted. Although many are. There are a core of people who reject progress and change of any sort. Young people are more open to radical shifts; older less so. But it is an individual’s temperament that determines whether they will be the first to try a smart phone or have never owned a television in their life.
We’re in the middle ground. Those who are cautious about change, but can be persuaded. We might get to around 85% approval in my lifetime, but maybe not. And it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with religiosity. Although those who are deeply religious do tend to be skeptical of change. I think the temperament attracts people to fundamentalist religions rather than the religion causing the temperament.
DeMint is a leader of that group of people. When he speaks, they hear someone telling “the truth” about the world. But it’s the world they see, not the world everyone else sees.
I’m most heartened by so many moneyed conservatives jumping ship on the untenable gay rights and immigration positions of the terrified rump. But they will always have a vote, a say, and a spokesperson. I just prefer it more when they’re burrowed in their underground dens fearing Armageddon. They tend to give the rest of us less trouble when they do.