More "Backlash" Fun

Gah! I just lost a major post on race and Prop 8, which I am not gong to reconstruct now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.

However, I did find a couple of other things that look interesting. First, Scott Lemieux does a nice dissection of Jeffrey Rosen’s “backlash” argument. It’s the same ridiculous argument, just different details. Take a look. (Why are these silly tropes always advanced by people who claim to be “sympathetic”? That’s almost as good as David Blankenhorn claiming to be a liberal Democrat.)

Lemieux also does a number on Megan McArdle. McArdle’s core argument echoes Rosen’s, which echoes all the “sympathetic” right-wingers who think we should wait for Daddy to give us a present.

Using the courts to establish a right to gay marriage made opponents feel threatened, and railroaded. If socially conservative voters hadn’t felt they needed to protect themselves from activist judges, we wouldn’t be seeing these provisions written into state constitutions. Few of them would probably have bothered to vote out legislators who voted for gay marriage five years from now. But with it on the ballot, in front of them, and worries that judges would make the decision unless they did, they shot it down even in California.

What Lemieux doesn’t call these two on is one simple fact: Going into this campaign, a majority of Californians supported the Court’s decision. Why don’t we deal with some reality here, because otherwise an event like this gets translated in the right-wing mind as a widespread backlash, and, lo and behold, it’s all our fault because we stood up for our rights (which is an attitude that has infected the gay left to an appalling degree). Crap. It was the result of a deliberate, well-funded campaign of lies and scare tactics by groups who want to impose their religious beliefs on the country at large. Frankly, the results of this election seem to me much more to signal the death of the right-wing culture warrriors. In eight years, the anti-gay cartel lost nearly 10% of the vote.

McArdle makes another statement that Lemieux doesn’t call her on, and he should have:

In general, courts are the wrong place to press these sorts of claims. The courts were appropriate for civil rights because blacks were literally denied the right to participate in the legislative democratic process.

Point one: This is a civil rights issue. The participation in the legislative democratic process is an iffy point: yeah, we can vote, but we’re a minority. (I get really tired of having to point out basic civics lessons to the right-wing “intelligentsia.” Constitutional guarantees of civil rights are not subject to the whim of the people. That’s why the Dobson Gang is so hot to amend constitutions. And that’s why in any state with brains, constitutions are hard to amend. Duh.) And as we can see from the recent results of the “legislative democratic process” on this very issue in California and New York, that process can be stymied quite easily by one person. (Let me also point out that it took 30 years to pass a gay-inclusive civil rights bill in Illinois because the Republican Senate leadership kept it bottled up in committee. For thirty years. Talk to me about the “legislative democratic process,” Megan.)

What we’re seeing from McArdle is a minor variation on the “wait for the old white straight men to give it to you.” She and Rosen (and how many others on the right) are advocating a strategy that seems more than anything else to be designed to yield no results at all. But then, conservatives are not about change.

What’s worrisome about this is the degree to which the rabid right’s “activist judges” mantra has worked its way into the dialogue, to the extent that even the left wing now assumes that a judicial decision such as this has “imposed” something on someone. I suppose there’s not much help for it, except to object to it loudly whenever you see it, because people tend to be sloppy about their use of language, which plays into the culture warriors’ hands — witness their sliding definitions of “theory” when discussing evolution — or for that matter, their shifting “definitions” of marriage. The outcry is always about “creating new rights,” when in fact, it is the opponents of change who are creating new rights. (I discussed this, I believe, in my deconstruction of Rod Dreher’s essay a day or two ago — they’re absolutely correct, there is no “right to gay marriage” except as they’ve created it as a straw man. The right is “marriage.” It is being withheld from a class of citizens without adequate reason. I still insist that is the only valid framing.)

Well, that’s today’s profound little post. McArdle is such an easy target.

[Reprinted from Hunter at Random. Originally published November 8, 2008.]