Read Part I.

Human life is sufficiently limited by its nature, purpose, and surrounding conditions that only a relatively narrow variety of moral and political beliefs appear plausible to us for very long. The dizzying number of historical variations on common errors conceals this somewhat, but even so the same errors crop up time and again; from ancient Athenian demagoguery to modern mass politics, from Plato’s utopia to Stalin’s gulags there is very little difference. But details matter. When diagnosing the latest perversion of thought, policy, or law, the reflective person wisely does so according to its antecedents in error. Conversely, when one hears something with which one roughly agrees—something that one thinks is mostly right—one is particularly disturbed to find some other person believing the right thing for the wrong reason. We might say that, because of human nature and the very small number of conditions that allow human life to flourish, most people in most times will believe roughly the right thing, but we may be shaken to discover the confused even contradictory rationales they have “filled in” beneath the line of somewhat sound principles. In brief, we diagnose errors by taxonomy, and we improve true claims by straitening the usually unreflective logic behind them. Grouping untruths together suffices, but a similar lumping of basic truths is actually dangerous.

Let us examine Sarah Palin’s words during the Vice-Presidential Debate in order to see where the vague consumer conservatism to which she should appeal departs from a principled conservatism. Asked about the extension of marital benefits to homosexual couples, as the Alaskan state government currently grants them, Palin replied:

Well, not if it goes closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. And unfortunately that’s sometimes where those steps lead. But I also want to clarify, if there’s any kind of suggestion at all from my answer that I would be anything but tolerant of adults in America choosing their partners, choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves, you know, I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don’t agree with me on this issue. But in that tolerance also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties. But I will tell Americans straight up that I don’t support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman, and I think through nuances we can go round and round about what that actually means.

How could the millions of watchers of The View not assent to such buffet-style suburban logic? “Granted,” she seems to tell us, “with whom one has sex and how one structures one’s family and other social units is an entirely private choice, up to each autonomous rights-bearing body to decide for itself, but don’t redefine a particular term that confers an unspecifiable privilege upon the nuclear family by extending it to other perfectly legitimate, because legally private, social units.” One imagines a nod of agreement from all the people out there who sense something wrong with homosexuality, but appreciate their homosexual hairdresser for his grace with scissors and snappy conversational skills. Just as some of our ancestors “surgically” manufactured eunuchs in earlier stages of western civilization to keep their wives company and to sing in their operas, our society has found a softer, cultural means of creating a cast of libidinous and “campy” characters whose claim to acceptance and “tolerance” in society is bound up with their occupying a strange and sadly grotesque position at its margins. Most of us are fine with that, so long as we don’t have to think about it. We accept as a good for some what we feel would be unhappy, even awful, for us and ours, because, in a world whose one commandment seems to be the imperative to consumer choice, we cannot articulate why homosexuals should act differently than they do. Are not their sexual choices as free, legitimate, and inconsequential as every other choice . . . so long, of course, as they don’t break my leg or cause my real estate values to depreciate any further? (Unlikely scenarios indeed!).

Is Palin’s an outrageous statement? Not entirely. Her divagations seem rather to spring from a dimly contemplated prejudice. Prejudices are intrinsically pragmatic and usually salutary, but we are, as a “culture,” now locked in a debate about the nature of marriage, family, and society that could only occur after two centuries and more of the decay of those institutions. We cannot, for the moment, rely on contemporary prejudices to sustain us, because the practices that gave birth to them were already on the down-slide.