GAY TRUTH

August 19, 2013 ( The Public Discourse ) - In a recent conversation with a dozen well-educated young social conservatives, I found that hardly any held to what ten years ago would have been considered the conservative position on marriage. A few had accepted the idea that marriage was a social construction that a majority could change. Others opted for the view that it was a religious institution, and political outcomes on the subject didn’t really matter. Still others thought that there were just other, more winnable, battles worth fighting. The most common sentiment: even though none thought a same-sex relationship was a marriage, almost none wanted to play for a losing team whose objective was a national stranglehold on people’s happiness. Common sense has apparently changed a lot in only a few years. When the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was passed in 1996, the overwhelming majority considered it common sense to protect such a fundamental institution as marriage. By the

Debating Marriage: What's a " Hater " To Do? In the   Public Discourse   today,   Narrator   Principal Brian Brown writes on the need for marriage advocates to discuss marriage in a way that appeals not only to reason, but also to emotion, intuition, and imagination. Brown outlines Nathan Hitchen's document  You’ve Been Framed: A New Primer for the Marriage Debate   to suggests several methods of unifying marriage advocates "so that we can pursue a future in which we are no longer viewed as haters and bad guys." Hitchen argues that to change aspirations, marriage advocates must understand five basic things: Emotion , which interacts with reason in people’s moral imaginations; Narratives , which shape people’s biases about pretty much everything; Stories , which make things relatable and personal in a way no courtroom argument does; Metaphors , which allow the mind to easily process and retain complex ideas; and Memes , which are easily rep