Ross Douthat is a clueless scold: How he just exposed the bankruptcy of conservatives’ anti-gay marr

[DonViejo]

Ross Douthat is a clueless scold: How he just exposed the bankruptcy of conservatives’ anti-gay marriage arguments

The New York Times scribe laments last week's marriage decision, with the usual hand-wringing & cherry-picked data

LUKE BRINKER

Does the dawn of nationwide marriage equality herald the triumph of a fundamentally conservative institution, or does it signal that institution’s erosion?

The answer, according to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, is both. In his Sunday column, the Gray Lady’s resident social conservative identifies a great cultural irony: “While the conservative case for same-sex marriage triumphed in politics,” culminating in last week’s Supreme Court ruling for marriage equality, “the liberationist case against marriage’s centrality to human flourishing was winning in the wider culture,” Douthat writes. Without the latter development, he posits, the former would not have been possible.

Douthat’s argument — familiar to followers of social conservative thought — goes like this:

The traditional understanding [of marriage], which rested on sex difference, procreation, and real permanence, went into crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. But in the 1990s, when The Atlantic informed readers that “Dan Quayle Was Right” about unwed motherhood and today’s Democratic front-runner fretted about the costs of no-fault divorce, there were reasons to think that a kind of neo-traditionalism might still have purchase in America.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/06/30/ross_douthat_is_a_clueless_scold_how_he_just_exposed_the_bankruptcy_of_conservatives_anti_gay_marriage_arguments/

[Orsino]

1. Not clueless--just corrupt.

Possibly clueless as well, I suppose, but his willingness to lie for money explains everything he's written.

[Maeve]

2. People forget that the law did once forbid marriage to those who couldn't procreate

And it was considered mean-spirited and wrong, so we got rid of such nonsense. Otherwise, no woman over the age of menopause could marry--and who wants to tell Grandma that?

[closeupready]

3. You know something? All the fancy schmancy words and rhetoric

in the world can't dress up homophobia as anything other than what it is - a hatred that burns so hot in many social conservatives that they openly advocated for the death penalty, concentration camps, and other kinds of misery for gay people, if not domestically, then certainly in places like Uganda.

And I love my gay family and friends a HELL of a lot more than clowns like this guy writing this nonsense.

[yellowcanine]

4. How jiggery pokery of him. Ross Douchehat - there, I fixed it for you.

[rusty fender]

5. Good one!