So I figured I’d drop the gay marriage issue after the last post. Also, upon looking back on the first screed I banged out in response to a Stan Kurtz piece, I admonished myself to remain calm and polite, even when responding to people with truly repugnant views. Well, I’m obviously not sticking to the first, and, having just seen Kurtz’s latest handiwork, continuous yogic breathing exercises are just barely enabling me to remain committed to the second.

In a Corner post pointing to the article, Kurtz flatters himself by comparing his argument to that of early communitarian critics of John Rawls, which charged Rawls’s theory of “justice as fairness” with an “inability to come to grips with the real social habits and experiences that make us what we are.” We do not, alas, get insights worthy of Michael Sandel or Charles Taylor to back this up. Hell, we don’t even get Amitai Etzioni. What we get instead is precisely the sort of watered down pseudo-communitarian argument from which Sandel takes such pains to distance himself in the introduction to the revised edition of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. It is the last refuge of those who resent being asked to justify abhorrent practices, and so potentially unbounded in its application that even those who resort to it most frequently cannot really take it seriously as a general principle. This is the sort of thing I call a Bloomism (after the late Alan), a rhetorical tool much beloved of conservatives: it looks vaguely profound on the surface, but like Oakland, there’s no there there.

I know I’ve touched on this already, but Kurtz’s argument-free invocation of the polyamory bogeyman is really grating. He claims Sullivan is adept at holding together contradictions, but the internal incoherence of this line of reasoning shows Kurtz to be the true Obi-Wan on this front. We’re expected to believe that: (1) The stability of marriage as an institution is potentially a “compelling interest,” such that if it were actually threatened, the need to preserve it could trump equal protection rights, even were strict equal protection scrutiny applied; (2) Polyamory is in some fairly obvious way more destructive of the institution than gay marriage (that’s what makes it a slippery slope, not a slippery plateau); and (3) If a right to gay marriage is recognized, there is no basis on which a court might prevent the recognition of polyamory, including any argument from social utility.

Now, I’m confused. On the one hand, these alleged destructive effects on marriage are supposed to be the reason for which equal protection equal protection considerations should be trumped, and marriage rights not extended to homosexuals. On the other hand, being (purportedly) still more destructive of marriage doesn’t get to be a trump in the case of polyamory. Both of these things can’t be true. If the salience of a “compelling interest” determines whether or not equal protection is trumped, then the empirical question of precisely how damaging some particular extension of marriage is will always be the key question. So why does Kurtz think that this is good enough reason to stop before getting to gay marriage, but couldn’t possibly be a good enough reason to stop at some later point? He thinks we’re capable of drawing the line after interracial marriage, but before gay marriage on this basis, so why is this different? Kurtz’s argument, after all, is that gender is relevant to The Institution of Marriage in a way that race isn’t, hence the offensiveness of using race as a criterion. Well, fine. But if it turns out that gay marriage isn’t going to bring the whole enterprise crashing down, and also that the number of people involved is relevant in a way that gender isn’t, why wouldn’t that be an equally admissible argument? Once more, Kurtz does a better job of refuting himself than I can. (Not, by the way, that I’m endorsing the knee-jerk assumption that there’s something inherently awful about group marriage. I mean, dealing with one partner at a time is more than enough for me, but it’s not like multi-party marriages are altogether unprecedented, or have rendered the societies in which they occured utterly unstable.)

Incidentally, I’ve got to wonder about the way he characterizes the right to marriage here. He writes as though this is something Sullivan just manufactured — some quirky notion he cooked up at his desk. Now, admittedly, I wasn’t aware of the long recognized Due Process right to marry until a few days ago either, but neither is writing about this issue my stock in trade. So, is Kurtz really just not aware of the case law on this question, or is it just inconvenient to bring up an already recognized right, one based not just on the importance of marraige to family stability, but also to the “orderly pursuit of happiness by free men?” I’m sure Kurtz must know that the Court agrees with Sullivan on this, but he’s scrupulous about not mentioning it.

I want to note, finally, what the rather heartening implication of Kurtz’s argument is. He wouldn’t need to seek a constitutional amendment if this sort of legal challenge didn’t have much chance of succeeding. And indeed, he probably wouldn’t feel such urgency if it it would simply be possible to pass such an amendment, or let the courts reverse themselves, if all these awful consequences really manifested themselves. I suspect that what has Kurtz agitated is that he recognizes the extent to which his defeat on this is already a fait accompli. The stench of fear wafts from almost every pixel. He knows that, given current cultural trends, the snickers that greet his arguments now will be guffaws in twenty years. He knows that once the normalizing effect of gay marriage allows middle America to increasingly see gay couples as basically like all other couples, there will be no going back.

So bring it on. Let’s have the court challenge. Let’s see how people’s attitudes change when the connection between gay marriage and our most cherished constitutional principles is drawn out by the Supremes. Let’s even see how America responds to an actual national debate on a constitutional amendment to codify bigotry. Let’s see how plausible these apocalyptic fantasies sound to the public when the argument is played out in detail on the op-ed pages of the mainstream media over several months, rather than in some mutual-admiration-society newsletter like National Review. It should be quite a sight indeed. Pleasant nightmares, Stanley.