Two thoughts about this.
1) It’s a good thing when any new person, no matter who, can come to see the fundamental rightness of something like the legality same-sex marriage.
2) David Frum can go fuck himself. Seriously, fuck himself in the ear, because he’s an asshole.
Frum, as you might remember, is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, the supposed author of the phrase “They’ll greet us as liberators,” and the type of cultural ninny who actually says things like: “After two decades of denial, Americans are at last coming to accept that the erosion of marriage indeed represents the country’s gravest social problem.”
David Frum is a very sharp man. Multiple degrees from Yale and Harvard. Author of a number of books. Former editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and Saturday Night. He’s even smart enough to be Canadian. He’s also not a particularly religious man. He doesn’t think two men (or women) cuddling together is an affront to G-d.
So you’ll have to excuse me when I don’t take his argument about finally seeing the light about gay marriage at face value, because it’s patently ridiculous. Frum takes the position that since “1997, same-sex marriage has evolved from talk to fact.” And because, in that time, society has not collapsed like a wet towel thrown onto bathroom floor, he’s willing to change his mind with “the numbers,” which say that when you take an even “closer look at the American family, the facts have become even tougher for the anti-gay marriage position.”
I know that might be confusing to some of you, so I’ll translate Frum’s words back to second-person Engish: Because pandering to the basest instincts of our country’s stupidest, most bigoted citizens is not as politically viable as it once was, he’s going to move his opinion to the other side, which will soon represent the point-of-view held by the plurality of Americans. This isn’t a just crass, completely safe move to extend his credibility — it’s also a complete reversal on an issue that affects the rights of millions of people.
Basically his position is: Yeah, sorry I limited your rights and helped marginalize your lives, Millions Of People. Now forgive me and don’t talk about how I fucked you over for decades, because I’m changing my mind with the help of “data,” which is also how you spell “magic” if you live in Mississippi, which is one of the states that votes overwhelmingly to limit the rights of its young gay citizens (and they’re all young because no gay adult would ever choose to live in Mississippi). And no, those ideas are not related.
Well, I’d personally just like to call bullshit, David Frum, even though you’re hardly at the top of my Insufferable Conservatives list. You’re something of the dorky wonk, and so that instantly means you’re 30 spots lower than Andrew Breitbart.
But it’s still bullshit, David Frum, because I’ve seen you speak, and I’ve read your op-eds, and I’ve seen you on television, holding your own without having to lie your way through a segment on Real Time With Bill Maher. I know you’re intelligent, and well-read, and not cut from the same cloth that they used to make Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, and Michele Bachmann.
And I know you’ve always known that letting two women or two men get married, and raise a family with all the legal benefits contained therein, would not contribute to the degradation of society. You’ve known all along that it would work just fine, and our world would become a slightly better place, and that culture would eventually evolve to this point anyway, like how we ended other types of discrimination in the 20th century.
And you still had the fucking gall to oppose same-sex marriage, because it was an easy way to secure the votes of a bunch of white men living in the south and the midwest. But now you want to quickly renounce your past, and try to burnish your credibility as a thoughtful conservative when that overall brand is in the dumps?
Well, you’re allowed to change your mind, David Frum, but I’m allowed to point out that you’ve almost certainly been lying for decades about a major rights issue facing millions of people in the U.S., and that’s truly some repugnant shit.
And also, uh… welcome to the club. If any illegal immigrant dudes you know need a green card, tell them to hit me up, of course.
