MORE PROGRESS, ANYONE?
December 14, 2004

by Joe Sobran

     My favorite liberal writer, Michael Kinsley, has 
made another of the witty arguments that always make me 
look forward to his columns. Only this time I don't think 
his reasoning leads us where he wants it to. He has 
unwittingly exposed liberalism's mortal weakness.

     Kinsley recalls that in 1989, THE NEW REPUBLIC, of 
which he was then editor, ran a cover article titled "The 
Conservative Case for Gay Marriage," by Andrew Sullivan. 
[Andrew Sullivan's article can be read at 
www.andrewsullivan.com/homosexuality.php under the title 
"Here Comes the Groom." -- website ed.] It was intended 
less as a serious proposal than as a "thought experiment" 
to provoke reflection. "Gay marriage itself," says 
Kinsley, "seemed so far-out and unlikely to happen that 
whether you were actually for it was beside the point."

     Since then, however, "gay marriage" has become a 
serious possibility. "Take a moment to consider how 
amazing this is," Kinsley writes. "Just 15 years after 
that NEW REPUBLIC essay, marriage is the defining goal of 
the gay rights movement.... Gay marriage is on the verge 
of joining abortion rights on the very short list of 
litmus tests that any Democratic candidate for national 
office must support." And today, "even the most 
homophobic religious-right demagogue feels obliged to 
spout -- and may well actually believe -- bromides about 
God's love of gay people."

     Furthermore, "Today's near-universal and minimally 
respectable attitude -- the rock-bottom, nonnegotiable 
price of admission to polite society and the political 
debate -- is an acceptance of gay people and of open, 
unapologetic homosexuality as part of American life that 
would have shocked, if not offended, great liberals of a 
few decades ago such as Hubert Humphrey....

     "This development is not just amazing, it is 
inspiring.... It took African American civil rights a 
century and feminism a half-century to travel the 
distance gay rights have moved in a decade and a half."

     Then the kicker: "This is also scary, of course, 
because there is no reason to think that gay rights are 
the end of the line. And it's even scarier because these 
are all revolutions of perception as well as politics. 
This means that all of us who consider ourselves 
good-hearted, well-meaning, empathetic Americans -- but 
don't claim to be great visionaries -- are probably 
staring right now at an injustice that will soon seem 
obvious -- and we just don't see it. Somewhere in this 
country a gay black woman, grateful beneficiary of past 
and present perceptual transformations, has said 
something today in all innocence that will strike her 
just a few years from now as unbelievably callous, cruel, 
and wrong."

     Wow! It's one thing to celebrate the familiar 
liberal fads of the past and present, which we can 
evaluate separately on their merits. It's another thing 
to prostrate ourselves before the liberal fads of the 
future, before we even know what they are. Yet this is 
just what Kinsley is urging on us. He's not appealing to 
any stable standard of right and wrong, just to 
unspecified "revolutions of perception" and "perceptual 
transformations."

     And what will these be? That's anyone's guess. A 
less fancy name for them is "political correctness," the 
wind whereof bloweth where it listeth, but always in the 
general direction of more sexual license backed by a more 
powerful secularist state.

     These "revolutions of perception" will seem a lot 
less random, mysterious, and unpredictable to Christians 
than they will to liberals like Kinsley, who assumes they 
are predestined. They'll surely include, for example, 
more tolerance for pedophiles. (Why shouldn't they enjoy 
the same rights as the rest of us? Iron logic.) And most 
of these revelations won't be legislated; they'll be 
brought down from Sinai by the judiciary.

     Kinsley is offering a sort of mystical liberalism 
that he thinks transcends politics, when it actually 
depends on the kind of arbitrary power the courts have 
been allowed to exercise for nearly three generations. 
There are signs that this is finally changing, and that 
liberals won't be able to enjoy that kind and degree of 
rule by judicial fiat much longer.

     Liberalism's fatal flaw, as Kinsley's argument 
shows, is that it has no permanent norms, only a 
succession of enthusiasms espoused by minor prophets. 
Each of these seems like a hot new idea to liberals, but 
soon goes to irksome and destructive extremes.

     Liberalism has no vision of a final, settled social 
order; it's always waiting for the next "revolution of 
perception" to overturn everything. What's "progressive" 
today may be embarrassingly "reactionary" tomorrow. 
Kinsley may find this kaleidoscopic idea of endless and 
indefinable progress inspiring; the rest of us may find 
it merely exhausting.

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