An exchange in The Corner over the weekend between Kevin Williamson and Matthew Franck encapsulates how the dynamic between economic and social conservatives often becomes dysfunctional. Here’s how it went down:
- Williamson made fun of a post at the Atlantic that was breathlessly amazed Romney would have a gay man as an adviser, even on foreign policy.
- Franck responded raising alarm that the adviser in question is an aggressive advocate of gay marriage.
- Williamson argued that people who support gay marriage should be welcome in the foreign policy apparatus, and went on to make an extended series of arguments for why the marriage debate should be low priority for conservatives.
- Franck’s rejoinder argued that the marriage debate is core to liberty and should be an extremely high priority.
These are serious posts by serious people and there’s a lot of substance in them to chew over, if you’re interested in the marriage debate vis-a-vis conservatism and how social and economic issues relate to one another. But there’s one other issue I really want to highlight.
Franck makes the point that the outcome of the marriage debate will hinge… in large part on how many conservatives think about marriage the way Williamson does versus how many think the way Franck does. Yet I think Franck himself is talking in ways that reinforce people like Williamson in their views.
Although Franck’s follow-up post gets into serious substance, his initial post isn’t a discussion of the issues but a personal diatribe against Richard Grenell, the foreign policy adviser in question. It bears the inquisitorial title “Who Is Richard Grenell, Anyway?” Franck says the problem is not that Grenell supports gay marriage, but that he does so “with a kind of unhinged devotion that suggests a man with questionable judgment.” Franck then lays out a number of tweets and other comments from Grenell that don’t rise even close to a level that would justify such characterizations. A few of the statements Franck himself makes in these posts are comparable in their tone to the statements from Grenell that Franck says are evidence Grenell is “unhinged.” Worse, in his follow-up post, Franck goes so far as to insist that if Barack Obama endorses gay marriage Grenell will stab Romney in the back and switch to support Obama. (Where’s the Department of Precrime when we need it?)
If Franck wanted to reinforce the perception that advocates of marriage are motivated by irrational animus against gay people, mission accomplished.
(My thanks to Franck for gracefully correcting my spelling!)
April 30th, 2012 | 8:28 pm
Franck’s animus is completely rational. Writers like Williamson (and apparently Forster) are happy to allow the Republican political class to put marriage on the back-burner while they attend to allegedly more important issues. In other words, they’re advocating total surrender on the issue. It is highly unlikely that Republicans will return to address the issue 5-10 years down the road when it is already a fait accompli culturally, when they have gotten away with avoiding it electorally, and when the party intelligentsia is populated with more Jonah Goldbergs and Michael Potemras. The more pro-same-sex “marriage” Republicans (and outright activists) gain ascendancy within the party, the less likely it is that the lukewarm will wish to engage the issue (and their friends on the other side) when it “really” matters.
When will it be time to seriously oppose same-sex “marriage”? When will fiscal and foreign policy Republicans admit that “the truce” is really a surrender?
April 30th, 2012 | 10:32 pm
[...] Previous |Home| Good Greg Forster, [...]
May 2nd, 2012 | 11:35 am
If Franck wanted to reinforce the perception that advocates of marriage are motivated by irrational animus against gay people, mission accomplished.
The real problem IMO is that the majority of conservatives want the social conservative votes, but actively oppose social conservative policies.
From what I understand, it isn’t that this man is gay. There are lots of gay conservatives. The problem is, this man is so into his fight for SSM that it can’t be separated from who he is enough for him to be “merely” about what he was nominally hired for. He is an activist.
So his presence is a problem because Romney needs social conservative votes. The question is whether Romney has anything to offer social conservatives – or whether a vote for Romney will be a vote in favor of a GOP with no room for social conservatives in it.
But Romney is (understandably) not feeling ready to have that conversation. The time for him to be open about his opinion on the question of whether there is room for social conservatives in the GOP after he is President – not while he still needs those votes.
It’s interesting how the parties sometimes parallel themselves. Watching the GOP attack its own because the Beltway crowd wanted Romney reminded me a lot of how the Democratic Establishment attacked Hillary Democrats. Now, watching the GOP working toward ousting social conservatives reminds me a lot of what it looked like when the Democrats were working toward ousting “blue dog” and rust belt Democrats.
May 2nd, 2012 | 11:36 am
the majority of conservatives
Or should that have been “the majority of Beltway (or so-called “Establishment”) Republicans” ?
May 2nd, 2012 | 11:41 am
Just to be clear: the position Franck is taking, which I take it you agree with, is that it’s perfectly OK with you for Romney to hire gay marriage supporters as consultants/operatives/whatever, as long as they’re not “unhinged” about it.
My concerns:
1) Are we really able to reach the conclusion that Grenell is “unhinged” from the evidence Franck submits? I say we aren’t.
2) At the very least, shouldn’t we be a lot more cautious about how we set ourselves up as judges of this? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to acknowledge that we’re making a very personal claim here, the kind of claim you really ought to be able to justify at a slam-dunk level? (Like, maybe we should be able to point to some kind of misconduct or something before we make it?)
3) Even if conditions 1 and 2 are satisfied, wouldn’t it be prudent not to choose this particular hill to die on? If we establish the precedent that we think it’s a good idea for single-issue activists to try to veto candidates’ staff based on our judgment of their “unhingedness,” how might that be deployed against us? Would our issues end up as net winners or net losers in that scenario?
4) Accusing people of committing *future* misconduct is always out of bounds unless there’s some kind of track record of past misconduct (or you’re a precog with the Department of Precrime in a Tom Cruise sci-fi movie).
May 2nd, 2012 | 1:09 pm
[...] Williamson’s Marriage Mistake Wednesday, May 2, 2012, 1:09 PM Matthew Schmitz Unlike Greg Forster, I find Matt Franck’s worries about the reshaping of our foreign policy to promote a very [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact