Macklemore's *Same Love* Wags the Dog

The invocation of federal power to change a simple fact of marriage that has transcended time and space, age and and geography and religion and ethnos (apparently for no good reason other than a sort of bigotry that has no root in any particular doctrine) has theme music now.

It's not particularly good rap, passable but mediocre, it gets by mostly on its heartfelt liberal sentimentality.  But it's certainly not its sentimentality I object to--it is, after all, music.  Macklemore's Same Love sets progressive talking points to rhythm.  It's almost the musical version of a Michael Moore agitpropumentary, minus the total surrender to cynicism.

Some examples:

The right wing conservatives think it's a decision
And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition

Where to start?  Conservatives tend to operate from either a fundamental intuition that things are the way they are for a reason (radicals on the other hand reject tradition as anything other than a cornucopia of ideas to conveniently either embrace or jeer at) or a fundamental caution that mucking with some very basic things could have far-reaching unintended consequences.  Progressives instead say, "If you can't prove to me something will go wrong by pushing the red button, I'm pushing it."  And if things do go badly after pushing the red button, they will claim total ignorance as to the causes (though they will imply that traditional religion is partly to blame).

But the familiar trope of the social conservative having nothing more to say than "the laws of Moses say so, and since I believe every word as written, God obviously hates gays."  Yes, to the progressive, there is The Enlightenment (non-Christian liberals), there is Safe Christianity (the increasingly progressive, so-called "mainstream" churches and the liberation Catholics), and then what remains outside these are various shades of Westboro.  If liberals are capable of more sophistication than that, they have been jolly good at hiding it in recent years.

And God loves all his children, is somehow forgotten
But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five-hundred years ago

Another liberal trope: You either jump on the progressive (scientific! it's oh so scientific!) bandwagon that there is absolutely no downside at all to either homosexuality OR divorcing marriage completely from its roots in making the sexes get over their differences in order to raise children.  There is no in-between (none that progressives care to discuss).

You are either for love or for hate.  It's really as simple as that.  Oh, and remember that progressives pride themselves on avoidance of black-and-white thinking.  Liberal social scientists are trying to build a whole social science around this--liberals love nuance, and conservatives like to be told simple stories that leave them ever-so-satisfied.  (They don't actually admit this; they utter many disclaimers; but if you read what they have to say about the "conservative" brain, this is is what the reader is left thinking.)  And it's largely due to their different brains.  So it's all very scientific that it's the conservatives that are black-and-white thinkers.  Unions good, corporations bad.  Community organizer good, business exec bad.  White people racist, other people not.    Religion bad, communism good.  Republicans greedy, Democrats altruistic.  Churchgoers dogmatic, liberal college professors open-minded.

Yes, if a Christian doesn't renounce that "for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife," he or she has evidently forgotten that God loves all his children.  In fact, you can't be a good Christian if you don't believe that there is a point to promoting only men and women committing to each other to make families.  Because if you do:

If you preach hate at the service those words aren't anointed
That holy water that you soak in has been poisoned

Yes, the words are not from God and the holy water is poisoned because what is contrary to equating one love with another is hate speech.  Shades of Westboro, yep.  To revisit the progressive dismissal of doctrine as subjective cloud-gazing:

But we paraphrase a book written thirty-five hundred years ago

Yes, either the Bible is a terrible book (as Dan "It Gets Better" Savage loudly and proudly preaches) or everyone is misunderstanding it if it seems to go against liberal doctrine.  (And if you find yourself making both claims in the space of an hour you have mad liberal skillz.)   Yes, people have paraphrased the Bible and rewritten it to make Jesus say things about homosexuality he never said, or so we're told.

America the brave still fears what we don't know

Caution over the fundamental and universal is labeled fear.  It's even given a disorder-like name:  homophobia.  Yes, it's boiled down to calling someone "chicken" if they don't fall in with the progressive order.  You call yourself a brave American?  Then throw caution to the wind, say "What could go wrong?", and hoist the Equal Sign flag.  Yes, prove your courage by giving in to the shame game.  Being "courageous" certainly won't hurt your chances in the entertainment business and being "cowardly" will hurt you big time.

Look up the stuff on "conservative brain" and you will see disclaimers about brain plasticity.  (Don't worry, conservatives, you can become open-minded even if you weren't "born that way"...)  However, brain plasticity does not come up because it is supposed that there is no kind of homosexuality that one isn't predestined to.

And you can be cured with some treatment and religion
Man-made rewiring of a predisposition

Yes, Virginia, there are no ex-gays.  And I can prove it to you.  Here is Joe.  He claimed to be cured of homosexuality and then he had a bout of recidivism.  So he was born that way.  Therefore, neural plasticity plays no part in sexual preference and same-sex attraction.  (If you've been to college and have been trained in the art of "freethinking," these inferences may well make sense to you.)

Also, implicit in this liberal talking point is the conflation of same-sex attraction and homosexual behavior.  If you are at all attracted to the same sex then you were born to be fabulously gay at all times.  Also implicit is that if it's a predisposition, particularly a genetic or epigenetic one, it must not be at all a negative thing -- which is an absurd inference.  Challenging the neural plasticity of our brains to overcome negative predispositions is not a bad thing in general.  It's only seen as a bad thing if the concept of 'negative' is out of step with the liberal program.  The way things are going, people will no longer be permitted to pursue conversion therapy if they want it (already outlawed in CA by our liberal overlords), and yet they will be able to have their sex change paid for by society.