The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

i'm content to confine my commentary to american public life.

Same-sex marriage is rapidly becoming legal all over the world. It's an international movement. You can't credibly say that this is simply the working out of the dialectic of liberty implicit in the American constitution since it seems to be happening exactly the same way here as everywhere: people everywhere are discovering that they have no moral objection.

What I've been trying to say for several posts now (a modest claim, surely) is that this new morality that everyone seems to be feeling might be kind and broad-minded, but it isn't very coherent. But whatever, no one seems to want to talk about that, so I'll drop it.

this talk about the family has been the political cover for some of the most noxious bigotry in american politics for decades now.

I don't find this line of argument very impressive. It's like a pro-life activist saying, "Since liberals want a large state and no restrictions on abortion, we have to oppose all enlargement of the state", a statement that's practically self-refuting when put that way. If liberals, as you claim, have decided to collectively ignore the illegitimacy and family-collapse issues because of James Dobson, that's tremendously irresponsible and petty of them/us.

Not to disparage single or non-traditional parents who give 110% and raise great kids, but statistically the outcomes among kids of broken homes are really bad. After controlling for other factors, they're at much greater risk of drug addiction, rape and molestation, homelessness, whatever negative social indicators you want to talk about.

I don't think that ultra-right bigotry advocacy groups are the only people talking about this on the right, either. We've talked before about Heather MacDonald (I went and read a bunch of her stuff after we talked about it, actually) and Charles Murray recently published a book on this topic (that I haven't read).

As I said in my previous post, I don't think it's a principally economic issue either, since modern American families are less stable than those of people in much poorer countries or those of Americans of past, poorer generations. And not to be facile, but it's just obvious that a family of two burger flippers is still better off than a single burger-flipping mom (at least barring perverse incentives in the tax and aid systems, but I dont' think the incentives are that perverse). The Family Research Council is not going to fix this problem, but I don't think liberals even want to think about it, and the liberal explanations that I'm accustomed to hearing -- for instance, that it's because there are no good jobs for poor people -- just don't pass the sniff test.

Also, I think there are a relatively small number of relatively well-off liberals who see themselves as enlightened bohemians unconstrained by outmoded patriarchal institutions, etc. You aren't going to turn on law professors or Katie Roiphe or w/e by talking about the need to stabilize the underclass through strengthening the nuclear family. Many would sneer, "Better off without it," which makes me wonder how much they really care about poor people. I don't see a remotely comparable anti-family bloc on the right.

so you want to know why good people are on the wrong side of the issues of the day? it's because bad people know things about the good people that make them useful.

Presumably this isn't limited to cultural conservatives. Who's pulling liberals' strings, and to what end?

if you ask me, the anxiety and anger that fuels this culture war horseshit is really about the supreme court saying some quakers and catholics were right to say their kids shouldn't have to recite protestant-flavored prayers in school (of course, this quickly morphed into complaints from jews and atheists), some dude from baltimore saying creationists in tennessee are superstitious hicks, so forth. it really is a dark and shameful thing that's not very sophisticated.

But just about every country has some kind of a "conservative" movement. In Canada, for example, there's this weird split personality situation in the square provinces. On the one hand, they're where the national liberal movements came from (the NDP started off as a farmers' party and achieved its first big successes under Saskatchewan's Tommy Douglas, and for ages far-right Alberta was ruled by Social Credit, a Christian socialist movement under the leadership of "Bible Bill" Aberhart). On the other hand, they're the power base, at the federal level, of the hated Conservative Party. No one in British Columbia votes for Harper because of the Scopes Monkey Trial. You can fill in your own examples from wherever.

I realize I may be going a bit far afield, so let me summarize. (1) I think that social conservatism is not unique to the USA. (2) I think it's something that every industrialized country is experiencing in some form, and that it's brought about by dislocations common to them all. (3) I also don't think that social conservatives worldwide are a mix of genuinely evil people and terrified rubes being puppet-mastered by Karl Rove -- that seems exactly wrong since in most countries, the conservative parties and movements are grass-roots organizations. (For instance, the Conservative Party of Canada is only about 10 years old and the core of its membership came from the genuinely grass-roots Reform Party, a protest party that was basically ginned up by one guy and his disciples beginning in rural Alberta. In Europe, new right-wing parties, many of them deplorable, are constantly coming out of the weeds these days). (4) I don't think it's productive to just tell people over and over that they're stupid bigots and rubes. Even if you're right on all counts, it's bad strategy. But beyond that, their complaints are at least of sociological interest -- even if you think that all the solutions they contemplate are sick, wrong and ineffective, shouldn't we at least listen out of diagnostic interest?

it's bizarre that we're in a political environment where we're afraid to say it and we pretend there must be some other explanation.

People are afraid to say all kinds of things these days. This is hardly limited to the left. Do you really feel that your speech is chilled? 

re: 1 -- I didn't say that any consensus, once enshrined in law, forever barred the possibility of any future change or reverse, and I'm not sure why you'd think that I did say that. Obviously consensuses (odd-looking word) emerge and recede.

The sentence in which I said all this went on:

elections have consequences and the "wrong side of history" is whatever the majority says it is...

So once the majority has declared its views and taken action to enshrine them as positive law, the conversation is over. The whole point of positivism is that the law is whatever the sovereign says it is. In a democracy, a sufficiently large majority is sovereign, and today, there is an emerging majority that is enshrining same-sex marriage in law because of its moral views.

re: 2 -- of course it's questionable. My posts are long enough as it is, no one is paying me to write them, and if they get even longer and more discursive even fewer people will bother to read them. I'm not going to bother to include footnotes saying "all this, of course, is subject to the usual considerations, like the susceptibility of a lethargic minority to targeted activism, regulatory capture, w/e". I assume that everyone reading my posts is aware that there are many cases where writing laws by poll would produce different laws than those actually on the books.

Of course, that kind of hedging would be appropriate were I writing a scholarly piece. It would be appropriate to criticise even my tossed-off discussion board posts for not hedging were I arguing (deludedly) for the general principle that laws always reflect every consensus, however broad, transitory and tepid. But my claim was that a new, strongly-held consensus appears to have emerged in most developed (and some semi-developed) countries in the span of a generation, and that this consensus is in the process of being enacted into law in democracies all over the world. So pointing out that democracies don't always uphold all consensuses (there it is again) doesn't really speak to the issue: all over, majorities are now demanding something, the laws are changing to reflect this, and since these laws reflect the strongly-held views of the majority, the opposition is reduced to merely tactical resistance.

I also want to respond more generally. The way we casually use language is necessarily overbroad. Words like "always" and "never" always imply caveats unless you're writing a mathematical proof. Broad statements about fuzzier subjects will inevitably be subject to attack by counterexample or a showing of overbroadness unless they contain so much hedging that they become unreadable. But pointing this out doesn't accomplish very much. I don't want my posts to read like a 200-page credit agreement. I assume everyone I'm talking with is (1) aware that categorical statements have implicit caveats and (2) makes such categorical statements themselves all the time. So what do you really want me to do differently?