DMN columnist Rod Dreher: Gay marriage a sign of 'the new Dark Ages'

I felt compelled to clarify something from the comments to the below post about The Houston Chronicle’s gay marriage poll. Jon Garinn, a gay advertising editor at The Dallas Morning News, has taken issue with my statement in the post that The Chronicle seems to do a better job of covering gay issues than our daily newspaper. Just so you all know, the statement was based on approximately two years of reading The Morning News, more than one year of monitoring The Chronicle’s gay coverage, and about 10 years of professional print journalism (not advertising) experience. And yes, I do receive The DMN at my home and read it every day (duh, I’m a freakin’ news reporter). But that’s not really the point.

The point is that I wanted to make sure people in the LGBT community understand that ultraconservative DMN columnist Rod Dreher’s recent column on gay marriage was BY NO MEANS a pro-gay piece. I just went back and suffered through the column again, and it seems as though Dreher was almost trying to trick readers into thinking he was taking a somewhat pro-gay stance, which is absolutely not the case. What the column says is that conservatives should give up on fighting gay marriage because its legalization is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean Dreher believes gay marriage is morally right or good. In fact, Dreher ultimately implies that gay marriage is a sign of “the new Dark Ages.”

“It is doubtful that any culture can long survive without strong, traditional families and durable moral norms based in a transcendental source,” Dreher writes. “Cultural conservatives should focus on strengthening their families and local institutions. Dr. MacIntyre’s advice is stark: ‘What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new Dark Ages which are already upon us.’”

I agree, Rod, we must be in the Dark Ages. There’s simply no other explanation for the fact that you’re a columnist at a big-city newspaper.