I'm not sure I undestand what's going on with Andrew Sullivan, and the parade of Bush bashing on the Daily Dish over the last several days. A few weeks ago his support of Bush was based on the assessment that something rather critical was happening in the Middle East, and the tack taken by the wishful-thinking Democrats was likely to get us into a WWIV situation, or worse. Has this changed because the President now endorses a movement to define marriage according to a traditional formula?
Let's not quibble about the precious role that the child-rearing family plays in maintaining civilization. Let's assume that the President is just wrong-headed about it, that we have incontrovertable evidence that scrapping the religious character of marriage and morphing it into a civil institution won't have any negative effects on the coherence of heterosexual families. Hell, maybe it'll even help. Does the President's wrong-headedness on this traditional issue mean that WWIV is less likely under a Kerry Presidency than it was a few weeks ago? Or is it just that a little holocaust here and there is a small price to pay for participation in an institution that ought to become mostly civil anyway?
And what's all the hoopla about Gibson's The Passion of the Christ? Heck, the Romans crucified hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of Jews, and one more Jew wouldn't have made the slightest difference to anyone had they not believed that He managed to somehow walk out of the tomb before the heartburn from the Last Supper had worn off. This Gibson movie missed the whole point. The Crucifixion of Christ makes dramatic cinema sense only because we know He's the star of the show. And just how do we know that? Were it not for the big unexpected plot twist of the empty burial chamber and some spooky goings-on, all that drama invested in the torture and death would have been just another nameless event in a long drawn-out, and mostly forgotten, holocaust.
Get a grip folks. You want a perfect society? Try Saudi Arabia.
Posted by Demosophist at February 26, 2004 12:16 AM | TrackBackI too find it odd the number of people who (a) seemingly previously viewed the war on terror as a serious matter, requiring leadership willing to do serious things about it, and seemingly supported the Bush administration on that basis, and yet (b) are now ready to jettison Bush because of this oh so important gay marriage issue, the sudden need to allow homosexual couples to call themselves "married" in some official capacity being all of a sudden the most crucial issue facing human society, like, ever.
it's just so weird.