Andrew Sullivan on Gay Marriage and SCOTUS Cases

Last Sunday, Fareed Zarakia interviewed Anderew Sullivan about the conservative case for gay marriage and the recent same-sex marriage Supreme Court cases. 

Here is a description of the interview: 

Sullivan: We’re part of families. Gay people don’t – they’re not born under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco and then just unleashed on the country to improve your dinner party conversations and interior design. You know, that’s not what happens. They’re born and bred in Texas, in Oklahoma, in Alabama. And they’re in the military and they’re part of this country’s entire diversity. And they want to be a part of their own families. And they’re more traditional than you realize.

So then began the battle you’re still battling, which is with conservatives.

Sullivan: I think the great disappointment, the great disappointment is that this was a really, in some ways, a conservative argument. This was a minority group seeking responsibility, commitment, pooling resources.  If you’re a couple and something happens to one of you, you have someone else to take care of you, not the government. There’s a really powerful conservative case for this. And so many of the Republican Party just never grappled with it until it was too late.

But in Kennedy, you know, Anthony Kennedy, Reagan appointee, I think you see the last strains of that moderate conservatism, which is, we do have this new emergent population. How do we integrate them? How do we make them part? I don’t want us to have a separate but equal institution in civil unions. And that was the big threat. And then Bush, when he actually endorsed a federal marriage amendment, suddenly the entire gay establishment were like, oh, we’re with you.