Robert Stacy McCain

April 20, 2009

Justin, kudos for identifying the coercive reality advocated by the gay rights crusaders. This is an argument I’ve tried to highlight with my libertarian friends: The same-sex marriage movement, as with the legalistic campaign to forbid “discrimination” against gays, is not about liberty at all. Rather, like feminism, it is egalitarian and therefore inherently coercive.

Trying to talk sensibly about such things, of course, invites the accusation of “hate” or, in this case, a diagnosis of “homophobia”—a mental illness which, even if we stipulate its existence as such, I’m sure I’ve never manifested. (Nor, for that matter, does my opposition to feminism make me a “misogynist.”) No matter how often one insists that the object of one’s ire is an idea—a mistaken policy or a politicized “movement”—the critic of liberalism will inevitably be accused of mala fides.

The repetition of such accusations results in ridiculous spectacles like Meghan McCain’s offering herself as the Republican crusader for gay marriage, by which she postures for the bien pensants: “See? I am sophisticated and tolerant, unlike those right-wing troglodyte savages over there.”

Having seen many others perform similar obeisances before the various bloody idols of multiculturalism—am I the only one who remembers South Carolina Gov. David Beasley’s convenient conversion?—I am decidedly unimpressed by Meghan McCain.