Andrew Sullivan affirms the paramount failing of classical conservative thought:
Here’s Chris Geidner’s profile of Evan Wolfson and me – who were once the only two gay activists of our generation who, despite core philosophical differences, made the once ludicrous idea of gay marriage the cause of our lives. It was a thrilling time in a way – because it seemed simply impossible, yet to us, utterly irrefutable as a logical and legal argument.
Gay marriage, as befits universal principles of human equality and civil rights, is an institution whose time--by rights--should have come long ago. Yet the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, so tightly tethered ancient religious pieties to his contemporary philosophy that certain matters of simple justice were almost forever deemed as conceptually unthinkable as they were politically inadmissible.
True adherents to Burkean conservatism would find Sullivan's findings of the "utterly irrefutable" propriety of gay marriage to be but an insufferable pile of eternal apostasy. Sure, change is inevitable, acknowledged Burke, but God's fundamental principles as articulated by God Himself in Holy Scripture never change. And our purpose in civic life should always be to strive toward God and away from secular adjustments.
This--Burke's near-theocratic strain of political righteousness--has infected conservative philosophy and stunted the West's social growth for two centuries. We still hear it in the mechanical blatherings of "Christian" politicians who pander to "value voters." Today's conservative pols resist reminding their political congregations of the French Revolution's horrors or Jean Jacques Rousseau's radical eccentricities not because few in the audience would know anything about either, but because ultraChristian self-righteousness just never gets old.
Burke (wrongly) believed that certain human traditions--say, the traditional Anglo-family structure--were evidence of God's Design. Now it's true, profoundly true, that a self-identifying conservative can present many "logical and legal" arguments against Burke's unflinching position; to paraphrase Sullivan, one could even joke, tour the country, go on every cable show, speak on campus after campus, agree to talk-radio grillings, and write essays and legal briefs and books in the proper defiance of Burke's conservative philosophy. But that doesn't change Burkean conservatism. It undermines it, but it doesn't change it--the "it" that has retarded human understanding for centuries.