We gather here today to parse the meaning of “boo.”
Not “boo” as in the greeting of ghosts and goblins but, rather, “boo” as in the chorus that drowned the bigot Rick Santorum last week after he defended his opposition to gay marriage before an audience of college students in Concord, N.H. Santorum took the same header into non sequitur and illogic that gay marriage opponents often take, i.e., if we legalize this, then we must also legalize polygamy.
It is a line of “thinking” that conveniently ignores a glaring fact. Namely, that there is not and never has been a large culture of people who felt biologically driven toward polygamous behavior, much less who seek social sanction for it. Santorum raises a classic straw man argument, tries to win the debate by stoking fear of what has not and will not happen.
And as you watched him washed from the podium by that song of opprobrium (i.e., “boo”), there was to it a certain sense of last stand, last ditch, last bitter dregs of resistance before the coming of a change that now feels inevitable as the dawn. The former senator and would-be president tried to minimize the question by noting the youth of his questioners — “I’m surprised I got a gay marriage question at a college crowd,” he quipped. “Really, that’s a shock to me.” — but in so doing, he manages to simultaneously make and miss the point.
There is an absolute historical pattern to the bigotry of social conservatives. They rally using terms of moral Armageddon against the freedoms sought by some despised or condescended to Other, whether that be a woman wanting to work outside the home, a Jew seeking to join the country club, an African-American trying to get home on a city bus. Then the freedoms are won, and people — even socially conservative ones — realize the world kept spinning after all. Armageddon did not come. Only change.