WHO'S THE REAL BIGOT?

I know I said I was going away for a few days, and I am, but something's been stuck in my craw for a couple days and so I decided to post on it and get it out of my system.

Here's the deal: I think Andrew Sullivan is a bigot. For all his talk of his Catholic faith, he's essentially an anti-Christian bigot.

But you say "C'mon, he's a member of an oppressed minority, how can he be a bigot?" Because he is.

The debate over gay marriage is a wrenching one, forcing people to examine for the first time one of the foundational components of Western society--marriage as traditionally defined. It's a difficult, vexing question with no easy answers. Polls over the past few years show consistently that a majority of between 51 and 67 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage depending on how the question is asked, yet to read Sullivan's characterization of the opposition to gay marriage, only far-right Christians stand in the way. If it's really the case that only far-right Christians (for whom Sullivan has coined the term "theocon"--more about that later), then there are a lot more of us "theocons" than I thought. We're either a working or heavy majority. Sullivan knows that isn't true, and he knows that we "theocons" represent somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population, but he's using us as a straw man to attack general opposition to gay marriage. That's the action of a bigot, or at least of someone who is deeply dishonest.

And why single us out? Because we stand for something, we're outspoken and we are today's most target-rich population for demonization. We get attacked constantly by the far and mid-left, from the so-called moderates, and from the libertarians as well. Libertarians attack pretty much everybody, so they're excused as far as I'm concerned. Attacking the rest of the country's politics is just what they do. By associating gay marriage opposition with us "theocons," Sullivan is attempting to marginalize such opposition as "extreme." Therefore, he hopes people who otherwise don't like "theocons" will favor gay marriage because we oppose it, and we're the bad guys and no one wants to side with the bad guys. Further, Sullivan contends that gay marriage is a "conservative" position from a legal point of view, in that it might promote monogamy and chastity among gay men, who have been notoriously promiscuous by Sullivan's own admission and example. Perhaps, but that still doesn't necessarily mean that supporting gay marriage is a conservative position. Conservatism is not only about limiting government and defending basic liberty, it is also about respecting the traditions and institutions of Western thought and society. Gay marriage has never been an integral part of our tradition. At best, conservatives should be in some intellectual conflict on the matter--from a purely legal point of view, gay marriage might promote monogamy and chastity among gays, but it might also lead to other mutations on the meaning of marriage. We can't know which outcome will happen, so it's hardly an obvious conservative position to support something that at least has the potential of destroying one of our society's most basic structures. And from a traditional point of view, it's difficult to make a rational argument that gay marriage has enjoyed widespread support anywhere, at any time, in Western history.

About that term--"theocon." Sullivan doubtless knows what he's doing in deploying it. In the recent war debate, the term "neocon" became a Democrat code word for Jewish conservatives who supported the war, the implication being that their support was more about loyalty to Israel than to the US. It was a coded racial slur, of the type the Democrats often accuse Republicans of using against other racial minorities. Sullivan has taken "neocon" and twisted it around to "theocon," thereby using the left's racist code language to describe Christians with whom he happens to disagree on gay marriage and other issues. This is the action of a bigot.

Sullivan doesn't like conservative Christians. Fair enough, and he has every right to say so. But for someone who wags his own Catholic faith in front of the world daily, it's a bit hypochritical and bigoted to single out other Christians--fellow Christians--for doing what he does, which is bringing our faith to our politics. To expect us to do otherwise amounts to repressing our freedom of religion. So Andrew Sullivan doesn't have to like what we believe, but he shouldn't be shocked that we don't like or support what he believes either. This is allegedly a free country. If he doesn't like our opposition to gay marriage, a position which currently enjoys majority support in America, tough. He should try to win support for his side without the demagoguery and name-calling, and the open anti-Christian bigotry he so often displays.