Gay Marriage: A Case Study in Breathtaking conformity

I have been doing or writing about political stuff for 20 years, since I was 18 years old, during which time I have got behind some pretty unpopular campaigns and kicked against some stifling consensuses.

But I have never encountered an issue like gay marriage, an issue in which the space for dissent has shrunk so rapidly, and in which the consensus is not only stifling but choking. This is the only issue on which, for criticising it from a liberal, secular perspective, I’ve been booed during an after-dinner speech and received death threats (“If you’re dead, you can’t talk shit about gay marriage”).

It’s the only issue on which both hard right-wingers and the wettest leftists have told me to STFU. It’s the only issue on which even friends have said, “Stop writing about it. It isn’t worth it.”

Many are commenting on the juggernaut-like rise to respectability of the gay marriage issue. Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard says gay marriage has gone “from joke to dogma” in a decade. Time magazine says there has been a “seismic social shift” on gay marriage, which has been “as rapid and unpredictable as any turn in public opinion [in history]”.

Another gay-marriage supporter says “the pace and scale at which acceptance of marriage equality has shifted is breathtaking”, which he puts down to the efforts of the warriors for “marriage equality”. There has been a “sea change” in attitudes, commentators tell us, especially in political circles, where everyone who’s anyone (or who wants to be) now genuflects at the gay-marriage altar.

Even Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, scourge of liberals everywhere, now accepts the idea of gay marriage, leading one observer to tell gay-marriage proponents: “Lay down your guns… the enemy has surrendered.”

How do we account for this extraordinary consensus, for what is tellingly referred to as the “surrender” to gay marriage by just about everyone in public life? And is it a good thing, evidence that we had a heated debate on a new civil right and the civil rightsy side won? I don’t think so. I don’t think we can even call this a “consensus”, since that would imply the voluntaristic coming together of different elements in concord. It’s better described as conformism, the slow but sure sacrifice of critical thinking and dissenting opinion under pressure to accept that which has been defined as a good by the upper echelons of society: gay marriage.

Indeed, the gay-marriage campaign provides a case study in conformism, a searing insight into how soft authoritarianism and peer pressure are applied in the modern age to sideline and eventually do away with any view considered overly judgmental, outdated, discriminatory, “phobic”, or otherwise beyond the pale.

Read more at Brendan O'Neil's Blog.