Sullivan, stop calling yourself a conservative

Here’s an e-mail I sent to Andrew Sullivan on the day the Texas sodomy decision was announced, with a cc to David Horowitz, who holds Sullivan up as the very model of a modern gay conservative:

Mr. Sullivan,

You wrote:

Allowing sodomy for 97 percent of the population, while barring it for 3 percent cannot possibly be defended as a law designed to prevent or deter the immorality of sodomy. It was a law entirely constructed to stigmatize gay people….

Equality under the law means something. And now, it inescapably means the right to marry—for all citizens and not just those with power.

Your views are your views. But, given your views, to present yourself as a “conservative” is not acceptable. To say that people support sodomy laws because they want to “stigmatize gay people,” rather than because they think homosexual conduct is morally wrong and socially destructive, is a typical leftist angle which denies any good faith or principle to conservatives, and presents all traditional values as based on “oppression,” thus making any social order impossible. Ditto your stereotypical leftist comment that the traditional institution of marriage is only about protecting “those with power.”

If you would just stop calling yourself a conservative (as that other phony conservative Arianna Huffington thankfully stopped doing a couple of years ago), you would at least be honest, though you would still be wrong.

Lawrence Auster

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 28, 2003 03:27 AM | Send