Sometimes you just stumble across things which work out perfectly – and I happened to be re-reading G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote -
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and to it is. Change is the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.
I think that the primary explanation for why we are arguing over the absurd proposition that a man can marry a man is because of this hard, narrow groove of change the left got itself into. Change became an end, and thus each passing year the leftist has to come up with something different – step by step we went from a rather mild disapproval of Christianity’s rules about sexual relations to the bizarre idea that any sort of sex is not just licit, but praiseworthy and something to be proud of. And so it goes with issue after issue – change, change, change and then change some more so that the erstwhile defenders of the little guy are going to bail out corporate bosses; defenders of free speech degenerate into defenders of speech codes; the opponents of one war become the advocates of a different war…
All very strange, but all entirely predictable in people who have, at bottom, cut themselves off from Reason and have been trying to wing it on their own for two centuries now.
