Megan McArdle doesn't think gays should marry. Every time she mentions the subject she comes up with stupid arguments such as it might potentially harm the institution of marriage by magically making it less attractive. The only logical conclusion one can come to is that Megan thinks that if a gay person married, people would think less of marriage, because they think less of gays. Megan never says she feels this way of course, just that someone else might, and that might harm marriage.
But why would Megan care if some bigot didn't like gays marrying? Why does the idea of excluding gays from marriage appeal to Megan? Evidently, Megan believes that the more exclusive something is, the more valuable it is, and therefore will always be trying to find reasons to exclude others. It's how she calculates her self-worth. The more exclusive the Megan Club is, the more valuable Megan is. This simple method of dealing with insecurity is the foundation of her career.
Everything she writes is affected by this drive. It's why she is impressed with expensive educations, why she tries to hard to keep down the poor, indeed why she considers the poor to be a seething mass of immorality in the first place. It's not reason, or education, or training or ideology. It's insecurity, and it will never be satisfied because insecurity is a bottomless well of need. No amount of keeping down gays and the poor will ever truly make her feel better about herself, but she keeps trying.
Either we can accept and forgive ourselves for the faults that we perceive in ourselves, or we can spend our lives trying to compensate for self-hatred. It's up to us to make that choice.
Megan's argument this time is that the people are afraid to let gays marry. Her words aren't even worth quoting. It's the same argument dishonest people always use. I 've read excuses from people down in the south who say the same thing about slavery. If only the north hadn't demanded the south end slavery, it would have happened anyway. Sure. The south would have voluntarily rid themselves of the system that lets them imagine they are superior to an entire group of people. That's why the south bloomed with love and support for blacks for the century following the Civil War.
Congratulations, Megan McArdle. You can use The Atlantic to make the same sort of arguments that it used to fight against. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was printed in The Atlantic. Now it prints your garbage instead.
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4 comments:
Megan yet again spouting off on something she knows absolutely nothing about. Proposition 8 probably passed by a narrow margin based on commercials that were hugely misleading about what the proposition actually meant. A lot of the commercials in favor of it suggested that if the gay marriage laws weren't overturned, schools would begin teaching children about buttsecks before they could spell. Proponents used a completely false scare campaign, invoking images of little, smiling girls and boys and how corrupted they would become if we continue to allow gays to get married.
But heaven forbid, being a journalist and everything, she spend the same eight seconds I did looking for the commercials on Youtube in order to do some research on the topic.
It's possible she did know and ignored the information to push her own angle.
The Atlantic is becoming the equivalent of National Review On-line.
Good point. Was she deliberately excluding this point or was she just lazy and stupid? Given what we've seen from her writing, it could go 50-50 either way.
At least with the National Review, I had very low expectations to start with. It's disappointing to see this come from the Atlantic.
It could be both. Most people seem to unconsciously make a decision and then rationally come up with a retroactive explanation.
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