Reality On Judicial Activism

NOW WE CONSERVATIVES are all in a tizzy about the California Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage. How could they, we wail? How could they find the right to gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment? How could they turn upside down centuries of tradition and custom?

They found it because they regard the issue as a simple matter of dignity and equality. They found it because the Enlightenment proposes that anything that can’t be rationally defended ought to be regarded as a superstition. Of course gays should be able to marry if they love one another. Isn’t it obvious?

Conservatives have to understand that we are a subculture in the United States. The educated elite, which drives the culture, gets to set the agenda on most everything in the United States, and we should that’s the way it is.

What conservatives have the power to do is make life very uncomfortable for the educated elite.

Mostly, we can make it uncomfortable at the ballot box. Thus we have moved the chains on abortion and guns because Democrats have found that their support for abortion and gun control loses elections.

On gay marriage the media and the courts naturally follow the lead of liberal activists and enact their agenda. That’s what politics is all about. Conservatives only get a look in when a policy manifestly fails (and we are talking big-time failure like welfare) or because Democrats start losing elections.

Does gay marriage constitute an attack on heterosexual marriage? Will it lead to polygamy and bestiality as the alarmists insist? Nobody knows. And even if it does it may not make any difference unless the Democratic support for gay marriage starts losing them elections.

Think of this. The government education system is a mess and mostly hurts the children of minorities. But the Democrats don’t care. Because the victims of the lousy education system don’t turn around and vote for Republicans.

That’s the tragedy about the social issues. It is lower-class Democrats that suffer from the dumbing down of the culture, the sexualization of childhood, the decline of marriage. It is their lives that are blasted by social breakdown.

Surely we should be able to find a way to speak to them. But to communicate we’d probably have to talk the language of victimhood. And Republicans don’t do victimhood. We don’t believe in it.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.