Wednesday, November 01, 2006

more on marriage

Okay, so I finally had a free moment (put that in "scare quotes") and skimmed the Stanley Kurtz piece from the National Review Online that Susie Bright mentioned yesterday. I could talk about the fact that rhetorically it's dishonest and fear-mongering, but maybe you expected that. (I just told a young woman in my first year writing class that she probably couldn't get away with a hypothetical rape scenario in her paper on campus safety, so you can guess my attitude toward this guy's hypothetical stuff.)

Here's a fun line from Kurtz's piece: "So from the mid-Nineties on, the gay community suppressed its divisions and united behind the public battle for same-sex marriage. Radicals in the academy laid their plans for both polyamory and a more general deconstruction of marriage [...]."

Clearly, I missed this meeting. Maybe it's the same one where we voted on the whole agenda thing? Am I a radical in the academy? I mean, in many ways, I'm downright moderate, much to the dismay of my more radical friends. And when was the last time any of us agreed on anything? This is like me assuming that all conservatives agree on stuff. It's convenient to operate that way, since it allows me to neatly compartmentalize and thus reject conservative view. But I'm not willing to do that.

Well, most of the time.

Now, I'm not sure I actually agree with the folks at beyondmarriage.org. It seems that they're suggesting a slightly different strategy that the one I have in mind, which is getting governments out of the marriage business. But, then, what I have in mind is ridiculously complicated and nigh on impossible.

Typical me.

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