Monday, July 10, 2006

 

And What Do Vacuums Do? They Suck.

Apparently, John Podhoretz wants to tell us that he realizes that he'll eventually have gay marriage, and that we should be very happy and just give up the legal battle right now and let the majority wait to approve it (ganked from Alicublog, which also does a great job on calling Podhoretz out).

Now, I could write about how disingenious this whole thing is. I could write about how, even though Podhoretz admits that he is not a fan of gay marriage, he seems to be admitting defeat without exploring the ramifications of said change of mind. I could write about how he distinctly ignores the fact that maybe, just maybe, Brown v. Board of Education helped to lead the way for the passing of acts that effectively killed institutional segregation. I could write about the fact that he blatantly ignores the 23-year gap between Loving v. Virginia and interracial marriage actually being approved of by a majority of the population.

Rather, I find the scariest part of this article is that Podhoretz does not care. As he says, he's not a big fan of gay marriage. According to him, it's inevitable that gay marriage will be here. But there's got to be a reason he's opposed to gay marriage, right? I mean, why else would he be so entrenched in an issue if he doesn't think that nothing of importance will come to pass of it if his result is not achieved?

And hence is the disingeniousness of Podhoretz revealed. If he's truly just admitting defeat and telling us to wait, then it tells us that he thinks that issues-- at least, issues like gay marriage-- exist in a vacuum. It's no big deal whether gay marriage gets approved down the line, or doesn't get approved at all. And this is the poison of politics. Forgoing the people at the end of an issue-- hell, forgoing the importance of the issue-- in favor of focusing on the pure politics of the issue. When you forget that an issue is more than polling points or dollars, then you stop being a politician or political commentator and become a whore.

Of course, it's more likely that Podhoretz is being a different sort of disingenious by hinting that he just doesn't care when he really, really does. Still, if he just says, "Eh," on an issue like this... well, it doesn't say a lot about his sense of politics, does it?

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