Elizabeth Warren and liberalism ridicule the defense of marriage. Are you cool with that? – Deseret News

Though Elizabeth Warrens candidacy is over, its worth remembering a quip that was something of a high point of her run. When asked by the head of a certain Human Rights Campaign what should we say to an old-fashioned supporter who was against gay marriage, Warren was ready with a reply that speaks volumes:

Well, Im going to assume its a guy who said that. That was enough to unleash the laughter. Obviously such a question could only come from a backward male. And Im gonna say, Then just marry one woman. Im cool with that. Encouraged by further applause, Warren did not shrink from piling on the hypothetical Neanderthal: Assuming you can find one.

It is a sad commentary on the state of our politics that such a thoughtless and disrespectful comeback could be considered brilliantly funny and even logically unanswerable. Progressive liberals like Warren resort to ridicule in order to avoid examining their own very questionable assumptions.

Just as Montesquieus Parisians, in his satirical Persian Letters, asked how can one be a Persian? unable to imagine a way of life or worldview other than their own so our liberal establishment, our great purveyors of diversity, cannot conceive any alternative to their extreme liberalism except simple boorishness and stupidity. How can anyone not be cool with the defining away of marriage? I mean, really.

Warrens confident cool is protected by the reigning liberal paradigm, which now indeed defines our default assumptions. It is appropriate that the hypothetical was proposed by a Human Rights lobbyist, since it is our embrace of a worldview framed exclusively by the ethic of human rights that silences all resistance to the disestablishment of real marriage.

According to this worldview, all laws and rule must be justified exclusively in terms of their tendency to facilitate each individuals boundless lifestyle freedom. Law serves rights, and rights are purely human, having no natural or divine basis or purpose. If we accept this premise, then the defense of real marriage is indeed ridiculous, and the very most that can be asked is that we tolerate the irrational faith of those who somehow dont yet see what is obvious.

It is no easy matter to contest a premise that has become obvious, or to recover the meaning of a worldview that yesterday was plain common sense. Once an intuitive grasp of goods not reducible to individual freedom has been lost or suppressed, considerable philosophical effort is needed to see what was not long ago right in front of our eyes.

Why would a persons sexual conduct or marital preferences matter to anyone besides the consenting adults immediately concerned? Why on earth would the act by which children are (or are not) made be of interest to anyone besides the ones engaging in the act? Why have civilized societies always assumed that the wildest and strangest human passion, the eros that stretches us between the most primitive instincts and the sublimest aspirations, needs to be formed, educated and contained under some authority? Much more needs to be said than can be said in a one-liner.

Theres no chance I can unfold this mystery in the space left in this article, but lets pass the mic to a couple of wise men. First, Aurel Kolnai (1900-1973), Hungarian-born political philosopher.

In the area of sexuality, Kolnai writes, Adequate and objective moral experience is intimately linked to a sense of religious mystery a genuine belief in substantial good and evil. The temptation to discard this kind of moral experiences as delusive, neurotic, wayward, and requiring a thorough rationalization (that is, dissolution), is perilously plausible. The category of good and evil of virtue and vice being, as it were, mystically up-rooted here, a process of shrinking and flattening will blight moral life in its entirety, including even its most directly justifiable and useful manifestations.

More recently, French political philosopher Pierre Manent (b. 1949), in his latest book, Natural Law and Human Rights, has warned of the consequences of divorcing human rights from natural law:

The law opening marriage to same-sex couples targets the very meaning of the human order: the point is to require members of society to recognize by word and deed that there is no natural law. Insofar as marriage was the crucial institution of the human world organized according to nature, (homosexual marriage) aims to overturn or abolish this very order. (The consequences), public as well as private, will no doubt be commensurate with the audacity or imprudence of what has been done.

Are you cool with that?

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Elizabeth Warren and liberalism ridicule the defense of marriage. Are you cool with that? - Deseret News