Gay Marriage is a Conservative Issue

Timothy Noah argues that gay marriage should be supported by conservatives on MSNBC.com (h/t Andrew Sullivan).

One of the ironies of the marriage equality movement is the conservative movement’s stubborn refusal to recognize its fundamentally conservative nature. There are two strains in conservatism, and gay marriage is good for both of them. The libertarian strain calls for limits on government’s power to interfere with our pursuit of happiness—for instance, by marrying persons of any gender we please. The social-conservative strain calls for limits on sexual license and promotion of stable families. What better way to achieve this than by removing a meddlesome legal obstacle to gay monogamy?

Andrew Sullivan answers Noah's question on The Daily Dish.

The GOP, at its core, is a religious organization, not a political one. It is digging in deeper on immigration reform, and marriage equality, and abortion. It is not acting as a rational actor in political competition but as a fundamentalist movement, gerrymandering its way to total resistance to modernity’s increasing diversity of views and beliefs. It is emphatically not a socially conservative force: it is a radical, fundamentalist movement, incapable of accepting any political settlement that does not comport with unchanging, eternal dicta.

It is the great tragedy of the era that Republicans targeted one of the few grass-roots, genuinely conservative movements as their implacable enemy in the last quarter century. They went after the one group truly trying to shore up and support marriage – and they even wanted to amend the Constitution to do so. They did so, I believe, for one reason alone: fundamentalism. And that is not conservatism. In so many ways, it is conservatism’s eternal nemesis: the refusal to adjust to the times in favor of an ideology that never changes.