Why doesn't Glenn Beck cover gay marriage? Because he doesn't believe it's a threat to the nation.
In a conversation with Bill O'Reilly on why he avoids culture war issues, Beck admitted that he doesn't think marriage should be a political issue.
"Honestly, I think we have bigger fish to fry," Beck said. "You can argue about abortion or gay marriage or whatever all you want. The country is burning down...I don't think marriage, that the government actually has anything to do with...that is a religious right."
"Do you believe gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?" O'Reilly asked.
"A threat to the country? No, I don't," Beck said, laughing, adding mockingly, "Will the gays come and get us?"
Beck quoted Thomas Jefferson: "If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket, what difference is it to me?"
This of course is shaping up as a big difference between the "mainstream" of the Tea Party crowd (if there is anything such as a mainstream to it) and the fringes that are part of the older "culture wars," right-wing crowd. For all their deplorable tactics and misstatements of fact, they are focused on things that do matter more than the culture-war crowd: questions about the nature of government, fiscal responsibility, and individual freedom.
Those are arguments that our country would do well to really engage in. It's at the foundation of the differences in the two major parties. Democrats generally believe that government can and should make people's lives better; Republicans -- especially the more libertarian they are -- generally believe that the less government, the better.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have serious Lincoln-Douglas type debates on these issues, instead of what we get?
Ralph
I think Glenn Beck has enough sense to see that Gay Marriage is a done deal.
ReplyDeleteThis is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
I think maybe Scalia thinks it's a done deal also. In the Lawrence v Texas case that overturned sodomy laws, he wrote in dissent that the end result of this would be same-sex marriage.
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it be amazing if, to stay loyal to his strict constructionist interpretive stance, he found himself forced to vote to uphold Judge Walker's decision, that Prop8 violated the guarantee of equal rights.
Five years from now, I predict that you will just say Marriage instead of Gay Marriage or Same Sex Marriage...
ReplyDeleteJust like we look back now and cannot fathom how we could have had actual laws on the books that supported segregation and that prohibited inter-racial marriage.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's my age showing, but it concerns me that the younger generations don't really understand this. I see it most clearly in the younger gay men who didn't grow up in the era of abject and official homophobia. Things have changed so fast in that arena that they would have been utterly unthinkable 20 years ago.
When Brokeback Mountain came out 3 years ago, younger gay men gave it a big ho-hum -- where for my generation it was the most important film of the decade because it was so true in portraying what it was like to live through those times as a closeted gay man.