They’ve been coming out of the woodwork since New York on Friday. Metavirus found one of the great examples of this genre, which was self-pitying and self-righteous in just the right proportions. Make sure to check it out if you missed it. But one Mr. John Vecchione over at FrumForum has produced something of a masterwork of the sort, something ostensibly intended to persuade someone to oppose gay marriage but unintentionally winds up accomplishing something close to the opposite, thanks to a seething tone of impotent anger that seemingly distorts any compelling arguments in the man’s head and makes him substitute reason out in exchange for pathetic threats, odd assertions, clumsy dogma and hoary old rhetoric. It really just winds up exposing how lame the case against equality really is.

The article is a strange one to me, largely because it doesn’t really attempt much of an argument. There are assertions but little reasoning, it’s mostly just a series of threats directed at Republicans who voted for the bill. Of course, bloggers have virtually no ability to deliver on political threats of any sort, so issuing them is a sign of weakness if you’re expressing your ideas online. Still, it’s weirdly repetitive: out of fourteen paragraphs total, seven of them (which is to say half) consist of nothing more than diatribes against the weakness of the state GOP, their inability to act as he wishes them to act, their certain electoral doom, and the certainty of political gains by unworthy and horrible Democrats (one of the paragraphs is possibly some coded denunciation of Gov. Cuomo, which I don’t get). There’s also an extended point about how the Northeast is both the strongest bastion of marriage equality support and losing population is some point about teh ghey being a part of regional decline, though obviously the fact that it’s cold there, and that it’s less cold in the Sun Belt, is not taken under consideration. So, to sum up, the bulk of the article is angry threats and decline-centric slippery slope fallacies. Nothing too out of the ordinary, sad to say.

Really, we have only the following substantive point:

Same-sex marriage is the equivalent of the government mandating that two plus two equals five.  Those who continue to say it equals four will be punished. That is what occurs wherever same-sex “marriage” is introduced.  The union of a man and a man or a woman and a woman is a new thing and should have a different name.  If it is to be implemented different rules and traditions-complementary to the nature of the sexes involved in them-would build up over time.  Calling these new institutions marriage is simply government backing of a falsehood with grim consequences for those who insist two plus two remains four.

But, of course, marriage has not remained constant over the years. Over the past two centuries, we’ve gone from a model that held that a woman is essentially her husband’s property to one that’s much more like a partnership. Unsurprisingly, when you try to construct a true partnership, a lot of the time it doesn’t work out. And you’re going to see more divorce than if one party can do whatever they want to the other, and the weaker party is prohibited from exiting the arrangement. I see divorce as less a sign that The Sky Is Falling, and more as an inevitable side effect of an institution that requires some very difficult and complicated things from people who enter into it, just like pornography is the inevitable side effect of letting people publish what they like. But let’s not start that discussion…

And there’s the inevitable appeal to the divine:

One does not have to believe in God to believe that men and women are different that marriage is between them, precedes the State of New York, and will be around long after it ceases to be and that it is a unique institution deserving of unique support and a unique name.

Which directly contradicts this assertion, from three paragraphs before:

Same sex marriage both in America and in Europe seems to be the coup de grace to marriage as an institution rather than a precipitating force. Last year New York finally acceded to “no fault’ divorce.  This law is of a piece.

Wow, being a conservative must be exhausting. To be able to believe that straight marriage is eternal and will survive this gay marriage fad and the State of New York itself, while simultaneously believing that New York has just killed off the institution of marriage, requires a lot more mental energy than I could ever expend. How could I top that?

Really, this bit tells you all you need to know about Mr. Vecchione’s philosophy: “I adhere to the view that liberalism can always make a bad situation worse, particularly if its view is codified.” Really, just from reading this article, the only conclusion one can draw is that the opposite does not hold.

And I have another song choice. This one is in honor of all the gay marriage critics–it’s not an antigay song by any means, as The Kinks were way ahead of the curve with the LGBT stuff, the song Lola being a great case in point. But it does have a lot of melancholy declinism that they’ll want to stock up on. Also, I’ve heard it was a finalist to be the theme song for The Sopranos, which totally makes sense considering the lyrics: