Out with Sex; In with Money and War

Why totally excellent political realignment is about to happen, big time

When my great friend Maggie Gallagher was at National Review we had a little colleague’s-only celebration of her book The Enemies of Eros. She said at the time she was grateful to find herself at a political publication where she could write about topics other than money and war. (And quite brilliantly; Enemies is a stunningly original work. It should be put into Kindle.)

But that really has been the problem. The Supreme Court, starting with Roe v Wade, repeatedly forced sex to the center of U.S. national politics. The result was 50 years of political incoherence. I suspected that would end with Dobbs. It clearly has.

I am and always have been passionately anti-abortion. (I never say pro-life because I assume everyone is.) The thing is that Roe, imposed when I was 16 years old, seemed to require me to be a single-issue voter, precisely because the issue had been removed from democratic discussion. Of course, my votes for federal office must always be directed to getting a Court that would overturn Roe.

Then that happened and very quickly the landscape shifted not only for me, but for most people like me, and even for most prochoice people as well—probably quite surprisingly to them.

I am unhappy that a majority of my fellow citizens favor killing babies up to a certain age. But that is the country I live in. I can no more excuse myself from its political life than I could excuse myself from the life of a Roman citizen in a nation that approved exposing babies to wild beasts. I can’t abstain from voting or debating on money and war, the proper subject of in federal elections, just because so many fellow citizens hold a belief that horrifies me. They and I will tussle over that issue in our states, where issues of money and war are not decided.

The same goes many times over for the other sex issue the Court thrust into national politics: same sex marriage. The two are vastly different of course. Except in Game of Thrones few people are killed at weddings.

At issue was a possible consequence many degrees removed from any single instance. I and many others believed that same sex marriage would further an undesirable trend in the (mis)understanding of marriage.

I think we were right. I also think the increasing confusion about marriage may simply have been an inevitable consequence of the technological separation of having sex from having babies.

Moreover—and this is very important for me but also for the general argument I am going to make here over the next several days—I think I see an encouraging development from my fellow citizens who favor same sex marriage. (Is that the polite term? Is “gay marriage” considered more polite?)

I believe I see, among the reemerging coalition for liberty, an increasing disinclination to push Christian bakers into bankruptcy for not wanting to express the views of the Human Rights Campaign. I expect that bad thing to keep happening for a while because the bureaucrats who do the bad thing are NOT part of the reemerging coalition for liberty. But my new best friends, Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles, seem to prefer baker interactions of a more traditional and tasty sort.

That’s important and for Christians very reassuring.

Lots of other good things seem to be happening over on what, until five minutes ago, I might have called the left or liberal side of the new coalition for liberty.

It has quickly become clear that my liberal friends, however initially confused and intimidated, are not going to join in with trans bullying in locker rooms.

Conspicuous also is a reexamination of “liberal” hostility to religion. That’s good for everyone, not least because showing up once a week at a place where you get told that you are not nearly as good a person as you imagine and need to get a whole lot better, now, is helpful.

I’m still not in good shape—pain management ain’t what it used to be back when the Sackler’s, of blessed memory, were in charge, so stopping for now.