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A conservative is a liberal ten years on. A far-right person is a liberal twenty years on. A nazi has turned forty.
Look at what "conservatives" are desperately trying to conserve these days: the feminist purity of women's sports which men must subsidize and watch or else we're all misogynists. The fertility of gay kids. A border.
Real conservative stuff guys. There are no conservatives in the US, just liberals who haven't kept up with the moral fashions of the freshman dorms at Barnard.
Fair, but the road travels both ways. For example progressives can't hold that gay marriage is good without holding that marriage itself is good.
No.
I've met queer theorists who held this position which is very much internally consistent: marriage is an oppressive institution that must be dismantled, and the best vector to dismantle oppressive systems is to accelerate their contradictions to render them meaningless, thus making marriage as detached from heteropatriarchal norms by any means is necessary and positive.
The only thing that dismantles is the hetero norm that marriage is for a man and a woman. Any other factor remains unaffected at best or reinforced at worst (legitimacy as determined by the state or church, etc).
It's like putting on a dress and gagging on your wife's strap-on to dismantle queer theory. "Checkmate, homos! Your degeneracy has no place in this vision of society".
The state and the church can be made revolutionary, and the internal contents of an agreement mediated by revolutionary institutions can be changed.
Read Rousseau for more details.
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That isn't particularly difficult for progressives to square. It's simple to say that marriage itself isn't good, but that our oppressive capitalist heteronormative patriarchy deems it as good* and, as such, confers many advantages to married couples. And, for as long as these advantages exist, gay couples should have just as much access to them as straight couples.
* This is merely one specific form of the fully general argument that anything that is considered "good" by conservatives/traditionalists/people I don't like is actually something that has been arbitrarily declared "good" by the fully uncoordinated emergent conspiracy-like behavior by people in power, and we could just as easily declare it "bad" and the reverse "good" and run society just as well, as long as everyone agreed to play along. Other examples include fat acceptance/health-at-any-size and also the denigration of logic and rationality in themselves (distinct from and antithetical to the common criticisms against rationalists and their ilk for failing to live up to their title of rationality).
You can't rally against injustice by expanding the advantages of an injustice to include your own group. Consider slavery.
By? Correct, one can't. While? Why not?
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Title IX dates to at least 50 years ago. Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act they're leaning on to push ending affirmative action is even older.
I think there is an element of truth to this, but it also doesn't apply to every progressive value, only those that have become widely-adopted and successful. Most conservatives aren't strongly in favor of organized labor, or the century-ago progressivism of eugenics and temperance, but probably are okay with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the CCC/TVA/adjacent infrastructure (some progressives would advocate for removing dams these days). And I'd be skeptical of the conservativism of anyone who embraced "indigo children" and such in the current era.
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