While it is folly to assume that black civil rights and gay civil rights are the same thing, I do believe a parallel can be drawn in seeing how the majority goes from hostility to acceptance in both situations. My comments were about white reaction to black people's civil rights, and I still feel they can be applied to heterosexual acceptance of homosexual rights.
And the "conservatives are just silly, neurotic, sad people scared by innocuous and beneficial Change" is a classic liberal smear.
And you can well expect it to be used by the liberal media. The well reasoning people here at FR are not among the folks usually chosen by the Communist News Network when they try to cover "the other side". They will certainly find some silly, neurotic scared people spouting hate and bile, and they will intersperse pictures of well-dressed, happy gay couples celebrating today's activities. I've always said that conservatives have to fight in the marketplace of ideas with concepts that can be sold to the folks in the middle. That's where elections are won, policies are made, and the tone of society is set.
Reasonable people made reasonable arguments during the Equal Rights Amendment fight during the 1970's, and they won the day. If gay marriage is to be stopped or contained, conservatives must either come up with arguments that don't involve religion, tradition, or so-called "natural law", or they must do the much harder work of getting the mushy middle to go along with establishing their religious beliefs, maintaining tradition for its own sake, and defining what they mean by "natural law" in a way that makes sense. Failure to do this means losing the battle in the same way the abortion battle was lost.
Conservatives have to level the playing field first. That means defunding the left and using political and government power, or whatever works, to disarticulate and destroy the liberal monopoly over processes of information delivery and loci of opinion formation.
I'm open to ideas on how to accomplish this.
If gay marriage is to be stopped or contained, conservatives must either come up with arguments that don't involve religion, tradition, or so-called "natural law",....
Natural law is the basis of the Enlightnment and the American experiment. Who said we have to give that up in order to be allowed to participate in the national conversation?
.... or they must do the much harder work of getting the mushy middle to go along with establishing their religious beliefs, maintaining tradition for its own sake, and defining what they mean by "natural law" in a way that makes sense.
Let's start with reinstituting the Western Canon in schools, and teaching kids about the mission of Western Civilization and its special subset, the American experiment. Let's teach them about American exceptionalism, and why the service-oriented, officious machine politics of the Left is a corruption of all of the above. Let's start there. And to do that, we have to get rid of the Ivy League, the academic Left, and the National Education Association. We must not only take education away from them, we must drive them out of education completely, preferably to roam the world in perpetual exile from the country they betrayed. If exile was good enough for the Man Without a Country, then it should be good enough for the mobs of World Socialism enthusiasts who have battened on our education establishment and laid their parasitic eggs in the ears of society's children.