30 Dec 09
The issue is, I suppose, "cost-free moralizing" about other people's private lives.
I've long thought that the solution to the cheap, cost-free moralizing that leads very upstanding people like Karl Rove to want to ban same-sex marriages (which they don't want to enter into themselves, and thus cost them nothing) is to have those same "principles" apply consistently to all marriage laws. If Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and their friends and followers actually were required by law to stay married to their wives -- the way that "traditional marriage" was generally supposed to work -- the movement to have our secular laws conform to "traditional marriage" principles would almost certainly die a quick, quiet and well-deserved death.
--Glenn Greenwald
Does he have a point?
30 Dec 09
Originally posted by FMFOf course he does. This form of 'family values' conservatism cherry-picks from a range of values regarded through rose-tinted spectacles, as all forms of status quo ante bellum conservatisms do (there being other, less hypocritical, types of conservatism).
The issue is, I suppose, "cost-free moralizing" about other people's private lives.
I've long thought that the solution to the cheap, cost-free moralizing that leads very upstanding people like Karl Rove to want to ban same-sex marriages (which they don't want to enter into themselves, and thus cost them nothing) is to have those same "principles" appl ...[text shortened]... quiet and well-deserved death.
--Glenn Greenwald
Does he have a point?
I'm always confused at the unlikely marriage of ultra-capitalism and 'family values' conservatism, in general. One of the defining characteristics of capitalism is that, as it spreads, it undoes prior forms of social organisation, for good or for ill. It tends to concentrate humans within larger conurbations, undoes traditional forms of community cohesion and atomises individuals. The 'family values' certain conservatives claim to champion - at least in part, when it doesn't affect them - belong to a different era (typically, in the US and UK, a myopic and partial nostalgia for the 1950s), one that the emergence of more advanced capitalism has played no smll part in usurping. What we see with 'family values conservatism' is precisely the 'lag' between changed modes of social organisation forced upon populations by capital and prior forms that persist as fetishes and as compensation for those alterations.
Everything that is solid melts in to air...
30 Dec 09
Originally posted by FMFAgreed. Let's outlaw divorce.
The issue is, I suppose, "cost-free moralizing" about other people's private lives.
I've long thought that the solution to the cheap, cost-free moralizing that leads very upstanding people like Karl Rove to want to ban same-sex marriages (which they don't want to enter into themselves, and thus cost them nothing) is to have those same "principles" appl ...[text shortened]... quiet and well-deserved death.
--Glenn Greenwald
Does he have a point?
