Are Cultural Conservatives Freaks?

No, says Rod Dreher:

Forty years ago, the moral values – against abortion, and for traditional marriage exclusively – that motivated one out of five Americans last week to vote for George W. Bush were so mainstream as to be unremarkable. Gay marriage was unthinkable. Regarding abortion, a top Washington politician wrote this in 1971: “Human life, even at its earliest stages, has a certain right which must be recognized – the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”

The author of those words was not a Republican. It was Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Yet merely a generation later, liberals are shrieking that unwashed hordes of Shi’ite Baptists and the Taliban Catholics have raised the curtain on a new Dark Age (no kidding, Garry Wills wrote exactly this in The New York Times). “Conversations yesterday suggested despondency among Democrats unequaled in contemporary times,” wrote Wall Street Journal liberal Al Hunt. A friend even wrote comparing this election to the 1933 burning of the Reichstag in Berlin, which brought in the era of Nazi dictatorship. …

This may come as a shock to liberals who don’t peer outside their cultural cocoon, but believing that marriage is something exclusively between one man and one woman is … normal. In fact, the opposite is radical by any historical or social measure.

It is also not a bizarre and reactionary act to vote for the presidential candidate who believes it is immoral to allow a form of abortion that sucks the brains out of partially born babies, instead of the presidential candidate who voted to keep that kind of thing legal.

Read the rest here.