The dominoes continue to fall: a second Republican senator has come out in favor of gay marriage.
It occurred to me that conservatives have a virtually unblemished record going back hundreds of years of being wrong about social issues: slavery, segregation, reproductive rights, interracial marriage, the right to privacy, prohibition, pornography... the list goes on and on and on. The liberal position on social issues has been vindicated again and again and again and again. In fact, I can't think of a single social issue on which conservatives have been on the right side of history. Can you?
You'd think that people would start to catch on after 300 years without a win.
(Conservatives are wrong about most economic issues too, but that's a harder case to make because there's not a consensus on the quality metric. Conservatives think that oligopolies are fine and dandy, but dare I say that reasonable people might disagree.)
The track record on social issues is pretty clear, as you point out. There were two obvious sides, and the eventual outcome is clear.
ReplyDeleteEconomic issues are a little different. Those complex issues generally have more than two sides, so the truth isn't really just a choice between the "conservative" side and the "liberal" side. Often the long-run consensus is a bit of a mix, or perhaps a third idea altogether.
This post should be taken with a small grain of salt, particularly in light of Ron's First Law: all extreme positions are wrong :-)
ReplyDeleteI guess the left was correct on the eugenics movement as well.
ReplyDeletePretty much. It was just their marketing that sucked. (Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.)
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_testing