That's What We Were Saying

I was going to fisk Cameron’s speech, but what’s the point ? Despite the MSM’s determination to portray it as the modern day equivalent of Henry V at Agincourt (but better!), we’ve heard it all before.

There was the self-conscious allusion to Blair, the slippery attempt to explain that having no principles is actually a sign of political sophistication, the nauseating exploitation of his own son’s illness...oh, who cares ? Any Cameron speech is entirely interchangeable with any other.

The only point of any interest at all was the further evidence offered in support of my theory that while the Right has a fairly good idea what Liberals believe, Leftists have next to no idea what Conservatives are actually saying. Specifically, there was Cameron’s riff on gay marriage:

There's something special about marriage... When you stand up there, in
front of your friends and your family, in front of the world, whether it's in a
church or anywhere else, what you're doing really means something...

And by the way, it means something whether you're a man and a woman, a
woman and a woman or a man and another man.

Well, ain’t that nice ? Funnily enough, social conservatives didn’t support marriage because they thought it was ‘special’, we supported it because we believed it was the best way to raise children. We knew that once the link between marriage and child-raising was broken, then all we'd be left with is exactly this kind of vacuous drivel about how ‘special’ marriage is. Well, that’s great – now why exactly should I care ?

Even as a single man, I can appreciate that marriage was worth supporting for the same reason education is worth supporting. It was all about our commitment to the next generation. But if it’s just about people standing up ‘in front of the world’ (huh ?), well, they can shove it.

Hey, if marriage is just about two people taking part in a wacky ceremony, why is the government even in the marriage business ? Why not just say the hell with it ? Gay marriage ? Fine. Polygamy ? OK. Man-dog marriage ? Kool. Just don’t try and tell me these people deserve some kind of special privileges just because they had a big party.