No Embarrassment
by David Atkins
George Clooney, speaking about marriage equality, gets what bothers me most about social conservatives:
“It’s always been this albatross that stood out to me as the final leg of the civil rights movement,” [Clooney] told Voss. “Well before Prop. 8, I’ve made the point that every time we’ve stood against equality, we’ve been on the wrong side of history. It’s the same kind of argument they made when they didn’t want blacks to serve in the military, or when they didn’t want blacks to marry whites. One day the marriage equality fight will look as archaic as George Wallace standing on the University of Alabama steps keeping James Hood from attending college because he was black. People will be embarrassed to have been on the wrong side.”
Opponents of progressivism are almost always wrong on scientific and social issues. They were wrong on burning people at the stake to preserve theocratic geocentrism, wrong on opposing the renaissance to preserve the primacy of the Church, wrong on opposing democratic/republican government to preserve the nobility and divine right of kings, wrong on opposing the abolition of slavery to defend their feudal racist system, wrong on opposing women’s suffrage and liberation to preserve the patriarchy, wrong on opposing the creation of the welfare state to preserve social darwinism, wrong on opposing the labor movement to preserve the power of robber baron capital, wrong on opposing desegregation to preserve white privilege. The list goes on and on and on and on.
And they’re demonstrably wrong on opposing marriage equality, action in the face of climate change, and universal healthcare today.
Demonstrably wrong. Just as wrong as they’ve ever been, and always are. The only counterarguments conservatives can make in reverse are about prohibition and state Communism, and those are weak arguments at best: prohibition was not a truly progressive move, it was repealed soon afterward when it was shown not to work, and progressivism today stands on the opposite side of the issue of banning controlled substances. State Communism, meanwhile, was 1) not adopted in the West, and 2) the misguided attempt to jump 500 years of history from feudal to industrial societies overnight while disempowering the robber barons. At least in the West, conservative opposition to reasonable progressive policy is almost always wrong, and has always been wrong.
And yet conservatives have no compunction about loudly proclaiming the primacy of their antiquated belief systems and defense of privilege, and unfortunately all too often shed this mortal coil before their deeply held beliefs become the laughingstock of society.
I do wish these people could somehow be punished posthumously for all the pain they caused, and continue to cause, during their lifetimes. If there is a hell or anything resembling it, they’re almost certainly bound there.
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