Manners & morals October 2012
A march of folly
On progressives, Feminism, and gay rights.
The basic question in life is “What is actually going on?” and it often requires a great deal of time to pass before one can find the answer. That is why I have only just begun to understand what is actually at stake in the proposal to recognize civil partnerships as “marriages.” And the clue came when I discovered that Stonewall, the homosexual rights group in Britain, was proposing a memorandum that the terms “husband” and “wife” should be removed from the 1973 Marriage Act and replaced by “parties to the marriage.” This apparently trivial bit of semantics carries a large moral significance.
It is part of a two-stage operation. In the first stage, some new liberating move is proposed, and anyone with an eye for personal freedom—libertarians and conservatives alike—will support the move. But then comes a new development: the propaganda that seeks to persuade...
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