Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe.  In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land.

Several years ago, in a letter to the editor I sent to the Seattle Times (my hometown newspaper), I made clear that I would rue the day when Anthony Kennedy might do precisely what he has now done.  A sentence or two along, I offered a newspaperish version of what used to be called argumentation—i.e., the giving of reasons as opposed to mere statements of opinion.  And I sought to make my point in a way that might appeal to people who do not share my conservative way of thinking—i.e., most people in the Seattle area.  For my pains, the Times not merely twisted my words around but actually replaced them with words having a totally different meaning.

Here, in part, is the version published by the Seattle Times:

Only opposite-sex couples—all of them, including the sterile and aged—have an intrinsic capacity to procreate.  We are told that marriage nowadays depends on love and commitment, not procreation.  Maybe.  But logically, it makes no sense to make the commitment.  The reason why marriage exists is because the social institution of marriage is too rigorous to be based on something (love and commitment) that ends when it ends.  “I was committed to our relationship last year, but I’m not committed anymore.”  Commitment comes in degrees and kinds, procreation doesn’t.  This is relevant because it points to the strangely (absent procreation) rigorous nature of marriage.

This is a strange letter.  It starts and ends like the letter of a sensible, albeit very conservative, person.  But smack in the middle is a weird statement bordering on lunacy—certainly it will seem borderline lunatic to the typical Seattleite.  What can I have meant by saying that same-sex couples have no reason to make a relational commitment?  Was I just being insensitive, and unable to understand such couples at all—never mind that my favorite workplace boss was a lesbian chef, and my chief boyhood friend was a tomboy who is a lesbian?  (My word-processing software flags the word tomboy: I am informed that it is a gender-specific expression, and am advised to change it to “active child,” “adventurous child” or “athletic child.”)  Must I apologize to the chef and the tomboy—pardon me, the onetime adventurous child—if I want to have any chance of being in good standing with them?

One might be able to have an interesting argument about my state of mind in writing those words, and about what apologies I owe.  Except that it wasn’t anything that resembled my actual state of mind, since I did not write those words.  For here, in relevant part, is what I wrote and submitted to the newspaper:

We are told that marriage nowadays depends on love and commitment, not procreation.  Maybe.  But logically it makes no sense to make commitment the reason why marriage exists, because the social institution of marriage is too rigorous to be based on something (love and commitment) that ends when it ends.

Now why couldn’t they have published that, instead of the bowdlerization?  Did I use a big word that needed to be removed?  Did I say something that was somehow “off” and begged for the hand of editorial revision?  No, on both counts.  There was nothing wrong with what I wrote, except that it was the heart of a simple nonreligious argument against same-sex marriage.  Thus, it had to be . . . fixed.  Politically incorrect thoughts can be allowed when their intellectuality quotient is low, as in “the Bible says same-sex marriage is wrong, and that settles it,” but this was not low; arguably, it was high.  In my mind I picture late-night shenanigans by clever copyeditors.  “And let’s make the heading stupid also.”  (The large-print heading: “The meaning of marriage: Does [sic] same-sex marriages fit?”)

In short, this was an utter distortion of my words—of the words themselves as opposed to an interpretative distortion of the meaning.  It was a low, vulgar, mendacious, but effective lexical evisceration.  Effective how?  It brilliantly sabotaged my efforts to argue against same-sex marriage in a nonreligious way, the validity of which could be recognized even by Scandinavian pagans.  To this day, anyone who googles my name will notice—can hardly fail to notice—the stupid and ridiculous thing that “I” wrote about same-sex marriage.  They will also notice that “I” don’t know my grammar.  (“The reason is . . . because” is the peculiar grammatical error of a half-educated person.)  My revenge is to tell the world about the ideologically trashy Seattle Times.

Ten months after the newspaper’s determined campaign to exhibit the “fact” that no opponent of same-sex marriage could be found who did not rely on the Bible, the voters of the state of Washington legalized same-sex marriage by referendum.  As my experience suggests, there was never a fair debate—not, at any rate, to judge by the spurious objectivity of the media.  I can only assume that, at every turn, the leading newspaper in the state made every effort to fictionalize opponents of same-sex marriage, turning them into cartoonish versions of themselves.  After all, that is precisely what happened in my case.

There is a large lesson here: Pro-same-sex-marriage heavy-handedness will bear bad fruit in time.  The victory of same-sex marriage, at the hand of the putsch artist Anthony Kennedy, is a Pyrrhic one.  For one thing—and it is only one infinitesimally small thing—from henceforth I can publicly trash the Seattle Times, and they won’t be able to do much about it.

The more important factor in the legalization of same-sex marriage being a Pyrrhic victory is that the public has not been offered good reasons why it should be accepted, and therefore same-sex marriage won’t, in all likelihood, be widely accepted in the long run.  (Let’s not forget that when Roe v. Wade was first handed down, many ordinary religious Americans—notoriously Southern Baptists—accepted the legalization of abortion; resistance only came later.  Among evangelicals, my late friend and mentor Harold O.J. Brown, Chronicles’ former religion editor, was notably in front of the issue.)

If liberals have fought for same-sex marriage dishonestly, above all by caricaturing defenders of marriage—this runs the gamut from saying procreation is the sine qua non of marriage in the traditional view (it wasn’t so even for Augustine) to saying opponents of “marriage equality” must be “bigots”—it is presumably because they fear deep down that same-sex marriage is rationally unjustified.  There is no way to argue for the quixotic thing called gay marriage except by distortions of one kind or another.

All of which is to say it won’t be hard to keep the mantra of same-sex marriage mendacity alive.