Gay rights and family values

I will be writing something largely in defence of conservatives shortly, but before that I just had to get something off my chest: why do conservatives oppose gay marriage?!

The fallback position of every conservative who isn’t just a racist is ‘family values’. That’s fine. I think most people would freely admit that a functional family is a beautiful thing. They would also admit that many of the values imbedded in family life are healthy, and socially and individually expedient, such as responsibility, care for others, sharing etc. I think most people would say ‘family values’ are good and would encourage people to partake of them.

It strikes me that if you think the bedrock of society are traditional family values you would want as many people as possible to live a life grounded in them. You would want as many people as possible to be responsible for families and care for them. You would encourage all opportunities for people to enter committed, long term relationships with associated long term commitments to employment and mortgages that are conducive to raising families in the traditional manner. You would be in favour of people raising children. You would be in favour of anything that enhanced access to this narrative.

Yet I have not come across any public conservatives who are pro-gay marriage and adoption rights. Homosexuals, particularly with adoption and marriage laws as they currently are, have great difficulty in partaking of the traditional family model, yet this seems to be mostly because of conservatives defending family values.

How does that make any sense?

The only way it can make sense is if such conservatives are actually interested in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families rather than White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family values. In this context one can understand how homosexuals who want families can be a threat to ‘family values’.

Rather than help more people access what they avowedly consider fundamentally important conservatives instead exclude people from it. Sounds like a rather severe case of cognitive dissonance.

Or is it just another mundane case of rhetorical bullshit? Excluding homosexuals (and others) from the WASP ideal is the protection of privilege, a strong theme in much hard-right conservative politics.  But you can’t publicly announce that the protection of privilege is your platform, so you do a few logical contortions until you can defend a policy that limits the breadth of family values on the grounds that you are promoting family values.