New Movements and Dangerous Freedoms

Same-sex civil marriage is not an inevitability, argues Matthew Schmitz in today’s On the Square feature :

The approval of same-sex civil marriage by the New York state legislature did not bring on the end of the world, or of history. It did not even mark, as Michael Potemra claimed in a post at National Review , “the end of the long road” for those who advocated it. The path to same-sex civil marriage still must go through many more states that will be far less susceptible to the emotional bullying of the SSM lobby than was New York, and it is by no means certain that advocates will ever reach their destination. More importantly, it is far from clear—even to them—what that destination is.

And in today’s second article , Rodney Howsare discusses how a skewed notion of freedom has come to dominate the contemporary world:

Nearly all of my students come into my courses with a far-reaching philosophy that is almost identical to that of Oprah Winfrey (or Lady Gaga, if you wish). I don’t mean that some of my students aren’t “conservative” or “liberal” (in the recent, political sense of those words). What I mean is that almost all of my students believe in advanced Liberalism’s idea of truth (that it’s a private matter) and freedom (that it’s simply the maximization of choice and that it’s the highest good).