The Power of the Opinion

Well, Team Inequality is being reasonable about things:

"One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our children, to build resilient communities."

That's conservative Rod Dreher, blogging at Time.

Of course, at his regular domain over at The American Conservative, he regularly expresses his persecution complex much more dramatically, as well as his vitriol toward progressivism and, especially, trans people. That is, when he isn't pitching one of his books.

Nonetheless, I've been reading these musings by opponents of equality with some fascination.  Scalia, in one of the most petulant, infantile, and unprofessional dissents I've ever read, naturally set the tone for conservative man-babies everywhere. The outrage, the persecution complex, the calls to revolution. None of it surprises me - remember, these are the people we've tried, with varying degrees of success, to reach for the past few decades. I know their narrative framings well.

As a practical consequence, I doubt marriage equality would have much impact on Dreher or many conservatives, if they simply didn't know that it was legal. Same-sex couples would get married, all of Dreher's Gay Friends wouldn't invite him to their weddings anyway, and none of it would have any bearing on his or his family's daily life.

The chief harm to opponents of equality is not that it impacts their own rights or liberty, but that the state no longer officially agrees with their moral and/or religious views about the matter. The state not being a Christian one is framed, not as neutrality, but as aggression and unfairness. At the same time, by harping on a small handful of instances of equality opponents losing their job, or their bakery,  or their flower shop, because of, however tangentially, their opposition to equality, the situation is further exaggerated as though every opponent of equality is at dire risk of being imminently sent to a concentration camp.

It is fear manufactured by some of those in the most privileged classes in the US- cushy white heterosexual men who get paid to write blogs and books for a living about the very culture wars they are, via their writing, complicit in perpetuating.

This talk of revolution and exile, because they, this time, didn't get their way on an issue that doesn't really impact them but so intimately impacts others is the blustering of former overlords being brought down a notch, with the rest of us who have long accepted that we sometimes don't get our way and that's part of the political and legal process in the US. Yet, many equality opponents, long our tormentors, speak of persecution as though they have invented the suffering of it, when the reality is that they have long inflicted it upon us - the non-religious, the gender nonconforming, the LGBT - and would continue to do so if granted the power.

Of course, these loser blusterings are likely not intended to placate the masses, or least of all to appeal to pro-equality folks. I've seen precious little concession that we have had benign motives for being for same-sex marriage in the first place.

And so. Now that we have won, can I maybe forgive anti-equality folks for their tireless advocacy against my dignity and equality, even if they haven't really apologized and still frame themselves as victims? It may be too soon for that for me, friends. Yet, with the weight of the Supreme Court majority backing me up, I can now care less about these anti-equality voices than I used to.

For me, there's peace in that.