...As the Washington Post scandal showed, through ignorance or inability to understand the arguments made by marriage traditionalists or some other problem, many in the media are convinced that they’re fighting the equivalent of racists and that, as such, horrific treatment of the people and their arguments is justified.
A human rights issue vs. a political issue: Journalists who changed their avatars and were willing to talk about it generally said they view same-sex marriage differently from a regular political issue in which both sides must be presented fairly and objectively.
Matt DeRienzo, an editor for the Journal Register Company in Connecticut, tweeted: “I don’t have a problem with journalists who work for me voicing support for basic civil rights for gay people. Or kids, sunshine, etc.”
And then we get various other quotes from people who are unable to view this issue beyond the “civil rights” paradigm they’ve adopted.
This breezes right past the central, fundamental question under debate and begs the question. If one adopts a certain view of marriage — then opposition to that view is akin to racism. If one retains the view that marriage is the institution that governs sexual complementarity and requires male and female then civil rights is the wrong framework and cries of bigotry are uninformed and scurrilous at best.
The problem I see with many of these media discussions is that reporters and editors aren’t thinking very much about it. There’s a lot of emotion, but not a lot of thinking. There’s close to no curiosity about intellectual arguments in play and the end result is some scary behavior on the part of the Piers Morgan types.
…provisional and contingent, tailored to accommodate what is conceived as a significant but shrinking segment of society that holds a publically unacceptable private bigotry. Where over time it emerges that this bigotry has not in fact disappeared, more aggressive measures will be needed, which will include more explicit legal and educational components, as well as simple ostracism...
Some of the arguments for traditional marriage, in case anyone has never encountered one:
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