Seriously, take off your American blinkers (and this comment is nonsense, anyway). Marriage isn’t an American invention. Shocking I know!
They tried, they tried as hard as ever they could, and failed. See: California 2008, Proposition 8.
Not quite sure why, but this thread reminds me of an anecdote a female friend related of her husband (this was at least 25 years ago). She was clothes shopping and her husband was sitting in a chair waiting for her next to the dressing rooms. She came out and he hissed, I have to get out of here! All these clothes are so GAY.
I believe what I am trying to get at is that, besides the squick factor that a lot of people have about really, any sex that isn’t their brand, there is the buried fear and disgust many men have for, not merely homosexual sex, but femininity itself.
Queers of all kinds must move in a world of fluid ambivalence which is anathema to the rigid black and white world view which is the key hallmark of reactionary belief systems. That is one of the horrors of homosexuality for them.
Are you withdrawing your claim then? I’ve never understood why people go to the effort of stating something as fact, but find it to be too much effort to provide evidence.
But isn’t that what the internet is for 
?
Google it, you say?
Marriage started out as secular, to preserve the legitimacy of one’s heirs. Marriage is a legal, contractual relationship. Religion didn’t enter into it until the legal trappings had already been established.
Well, Monica is the one who told her friends that she was going to Washington to “earn her presidential kneepads.” Wrong of Clinton to agree, but Monica was no innocent child.
Your views, there — would it be fair to refer to them as rigid? Or, possibly, as black-and-white?
To which views do you refer? My ideas about reactionaries or my ideas about queers?
You flatly stated that something “is anathema to the rigid black and white world view which is the key hallmark of reactionary belief systems.” Would you say that your — absolutist? — claims about those belief systems reflect, as it were, some kind of rigid and black-and-white view?
Ah. Yes, I too am very prone to absolutism, at least about things that I find ugly. That doesn’t make me wrong though. Mind, I am not speaking of conservatism, which does not require punitiveness, anger, or fear, which reactionism does, at least in my view. I think that whenever one gets angry, nuance flies out the window.
Well, maybe I’ve had it wrong all these years. I figured it was like this: we try some new policy or whatever, and if I’m solidly in favor of what strikes me as an improvement you’ll soon enough hear me expressing what I’d call a conservative attitude to it; but if I think it’s proving to be worse than what we did before, then I’ll (a) start talking like a right-winger upon figuring we should go back to doing what we did before, or I’ll (b) push for something new and different while talking like a left-winger.
To the best of my knowledge, that means I’m a conservative on some issues, and a reactionary on others, and a liberal on yet others — but, as far as I can tell, the same sentiments seem to be in play each time, regardless of which conclusion I happen to be reaching on any given issue.
That’s not what any of those labels mean. What they indicate is a generalized stance toward the world, not a case by case assessment.
That seems unworkable. I of course go case by case; I’d hope that you do, too; and I suspect that anyone you’d hang the ‘reactionary’ label on could truthfully reply that, oh, hey, on this issue, sure; but, well, I go case by case, see, and could name issues where I’m not reactionary.
Who the heck doesn’t go case by case?
You’re the only person on earth who is completely objective and dispassionate, then. Everyone else relies on their society, leaders, mentors, what they’ve read, their culture, previous experiences – we often call this, “political identification”. Generally without even noticing.
For example, I was strongly shaped by being raised by a pair of politically alert and active liberal journalists during a time of intense societal change (1960’s & early 1970’s), and spending a lot of early adulthood in radicalizing environments like hippie communal farms, leftist colleges, participating in such things as protest marches, reading Franz Fanon, Malcom X , Betty Friedan and other feminists … living through the Watergate hearings, JKF assassination, other huge events. I cannot look at the world except through the lens of my past, my education, and my personality. Congratulations on rising above all that yourself.