An insightful comment by Iain T. Benson:
[With regard to Same Sex 'Marriage']
The larger frame is society and culture. As we anticipated, correctly, in Canada many years ago, what is at issue are the larger questions relating to law and associations--particularly religions. There is no "liberal" position (singular) but, rather, a variety of positions.
Some purport to be "liberal" and support diversity but do not do so. Many in the SSM movement, or sympathizers with it, wish to have only one public moral viewpoint on SSM and to attack other traditions and positions with every legal strategem available. William Galston has rightly called such "illiberals" "civic totalists".
We see their attacks and strategies in evidence in Canada (see the challenges to the ongoing attempts by Trinity Western University to have Canada's first and only Christian law school for an ongoing example). By painting access to A public SSM the move is soon to make SSM THE only public norm and then to challenge any alternative moral arguments about marriage and sexuality as "outside the new public norm."
Thus understood, the deeper significance of SSM is as much the survival of genuine diversity in the public sphere of democracies as anything else. Because religious people and religious institutions and other kinds of associations have (or perhaps have had) the right to public involvement, benefits and access the future for them is uncertain unless public diversity is recognized and guaranteed.
Many legal protections need to be built in if diversity and pluralism are going to survive in relation to contested views of sexuality, morality and religion.
Understood against the background of challenges already experienced in other countries, SSM turns out to be a steam-roller against respect for the other and attacks genuine diversity. As such it is about social homogenization as much as the access to marriage. What seeks admission quickly becomes a quest for domination. What claims tolerance quickly abuses toleration and becomes totalistic intolerance.
You are already seeing this intolerance masquerading as toleration in the USA, as we have in Canada, with witch-hunts and firings and wide-spread stigmatisation of alternative moral viewpoints as "homophobia" akin to racism when they are nothing of the sort. The analogy to racism is silly but widely used at all levels showing the general failure of education amongst elites never mind the general population.
The dumbing down of nuanced distinctions about moral choices in relation to sexual conduct coincided with the dumbing down of law by misuse of sloppy concepts like "equality" and "discrimination".
The stage has thus been set in education, media, law and politics....now watch the tragedy unfold.
Only the truly naive can argue that SSM is even primarily about marriage.
Some purport to be "liberal" and support diversity but do not do so. Many in the SSM movement, or sympathizers with it, wish to have only one public moral viewpoint on SSM and to attack other traditions and positions with every legal strategem available. William Galston has rightly called such "illiberals" "civic totalists".
We see their attacks and strategies in evidence in Canada (see the challenges to the ongoing attempts by Trinity Western University to have Canada's first and only Christian law school for an ongoing example). By painting access to A public SSM the move is soon to make SSM THE only public norm and then to challenge any alternative moral arguments about marriage and sexuality as "outside the new public norm."
Thus understood, the deeper significance of SSM is as much the survival of genuine diversity in the public sphere of democracies as anything else. Because religious people and religious institutions and other kinds of associations have (or perhaps have had) the right to public involvement, benefits and access the future for them is uncertain unless public diversity is recognized and guaranteed.
Many legal protections need to be built in if diversity and pluralism are going to survive in relation to contested views of sexuality, morality and religion.
Understood against the background of challenges already experienced in other countries, SSM turns out to be a steam-roller against respect for the other and attacks genuine diversity. As such it is about social homogenization as much as the access to marriage. What seeks admission quickly becomes a quest for domination. What claims tolerance quickly abuses toleration and becomes totalistic intolerance.
You are already seeing this intolerance masquerading as toleration in the USA, as we have in Canada, with witch-hunts and firings and wide-spread stigmatisation of alternative moral viewpoints as "homophobia" akin to racism when they are nothing of the sort. The analogy to racism is silly but widely used at all levels showing the general failure of education amongst elites never mind the general population.
The dumbing down of nuanced distinctions about moral choices in relation to sexual conduct coincided with the dumbing down of law by misuse of sloppy concepts like "equality" and "discrimination".
The stage has thus been set in education, media, law and politics....now watch the tragedy unfold.
Only the truly naive can argue that SSM is even primarily about marriage.
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