The amount of vile spewed against conservative Republicans for opposing gay marriage is head scratching. In a period of fewer than 10 years, the doctrinaire politically correct police have discovered the issue, come to agree with it, and declared opponents of same sex marriage knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. In the 1990’s, no one was talking about this issue. Civil unions was all the rage. But in a decade, gay marriage became so obvious and one-sided to some people that all who opposed it became fascista. That’s ridiculous.

Let me get one thing off the table. I have actively supported same sex marriage for years — even in the 1990’s. I have written about it on this blog countless times and I have privately argued in its favor in the deep, dark recesses of conservative Republican huddles. I am one of the people who sees this issue as obvious — I think it’s a civil rights issue — but never once have I misunderstood or painted those who oppose it as characteristically evil. Because they are not.

Conservatives are supposed to oppose radical changes like gay marriage. The core of their philosophy is to slow down change. Indeed, conservatism is not even an ideology; it is a guiding inclination to stick with what has worked over a period of generations. Abraham Lincoln summed it up in the simplest words: “Conservatism is the tried and true against the new and untried,” he said.

Conservatives don’t throw out time-tested institutions lightly because they understand that abrupt change can be disastrous. The law of unintended consequences is always lurking. When we mess with established truths, we gamble with history itself. We gamble with the future in ways we can’t possibly understand.

Or as Santayana said: “We never know how near to the taproot of the tree we are hacking.”

Traditional marriage  is the taproot of Western Civilization.  How can conservatives not be wary of the sudden alteration of an institution at the core of the word’s social structure for millennia?

You can go ahead and support gay marriage.  I do. But trying to paint opponents as behemoths is wrongheaded and hypocritical.  If the issue is so cut and dry, why wasn’t everyone arguing for it in the 80’s? 

P.S.  I’m going to write more fully about this in my Monday Newsday Westchester column.