Salon now regularly features opinion pieces by the pseudonymous “Glenallen Walken,” described by the editors as “a real live conservative and former Bush official who chooses to remain anonymous.” The desire for anonymity may be understandable, since the column’s title is “Ask a Wingnut.”
Walken’s most recent piece tackles marriage equality, and why conservatives oppose it. The piece is reasonably successful in setting forth conservative arguments; I found it far less so in addressing why anyone who doesn’t already subscribe to them should be persuaded.
Instead Walken sets up a straw man to unsubtly accuse marriage proponents of bad faith, overtly suggests that they want marriage more to force their beliefs on others than for the sake of marriage itself, and implies that the best way to reinforce “social traditions that, over time, have demonstrated that they exist for everyone’s benefit” is to exclude gay couples from those traditions. And that’s in just the first three paragraphs.
Walken then describes marriage as “the best way to establish an enduring relationship between adults to best protect the interests of children and, to some degree, women.” If there are prizes for unselfconscious displays of egregious sexism and paternalism, that one gets my vote.
Walken also repeats the canard that your church might be legally required to perform marriages that it finds objectionable on religious grounds, going back to Henry VIII for precedent. (Personally, I think that’s kind of a stretch.)
If I fisk the whole thing, I’ll be here all night. But the column’s worth reading, if only because it outlines the arguments without being completely infuriating. Which is not to say that I find any of them at all persuasive.
(Via Pam’s House Blend.)
