Reply #15: yes and no.... [View All]

[Lexingtonian]

I'm not sure who/what exactly you mean with 'triangulating', but the Democrats I think you are arguing with don't necessarily disagree with gay marriage. They disagree with aggressive emphases on it at this political moment.

They have a point. In fact, I think a sort of poetic/imaginative look at what the GOP is doing nationally, now that it has unobstructed power and no Democratic/liberal distraction, is redebating the issues of white American history within itself. In a sense, there's nothing else they share as knowledge, such as it is, or common inheritance- what else could they possibly be rearguing.

Right now we've done the New Start (Bush's Inauguration vulgarity and Republican full majorities celebrating themselves gleefully and vainly) and quickly got to indentured servitude (1620s) in February as the Bankrupcy Bill. We've done Conquest/Rape/Cultivation of the Wilderness as the ANWR argument, the refusal to clean up the BIA mess, and the reduction of farm subsidies and Medicare. We're into the battles of Puritanism at this point- the Mary Dyer life/death issues (1657-60) curiously contorted as the Schiavo argument, the argument about theocratic judges and rule (1663-1720s) as the 'nuclear option', the Salem Witch trial and its (too late for some victims) reversal (1692, 1693) in the East Waynesville Baptist Church business. At the present clip of roughly 1 year of American history per day, this argument will last another month or two and the present RR Neopuritanism be defeated for all practical purposes...for all time.

Even if this fun theory is wrong, empirically the Republican argument among themselves is all about theocracy and its role. Some Democrats have caught on to the overall picture- the status of the Religious Right leadership's agenda getting destroyed within the GOP- and realized that the worst possible thing to do at the moment is to give them some Democratic opposition to rally against.

So I see the Democratic response as some combination of uninformed and wise 'don't interrupt your enemy while he's handing you the victory you want'.