Sally Kohn, addled like them!

MONDAY, MARCH 25, 2013

At Salon, support simply isn’t enough: On Saturday morning, March 16, the New York Times reshaped space and time.

That morning, the paper reported, on page A11, that Ohio senator Rob Portman had come out in favor of gay marriage. And good lord!

That very same morning, on page A20, the Times already had a letter saying that Portman was a hypocrite for having done so!

The letter appeared in the hard-copy Times on the same day as the news report! How in the world does the liberal world do it?

Here’s how:

The letter-writer was reacting to an on-line post which had appeared the day before. Still, the Times had established a new world record in the drive to refuse to take yes for an answer. On the same day the paper reported Portman’s shift, it was already printing a letter rejecting the shift as hypocrisy!

We thought of that letter when we read this new blog post by Paul Krugman. To see what we’re talking about, you’ll have to get past the part about Matthew Yglesias’ fancy, expensive new crib

In our view, that blog post was The Bad Krugman talking, the Krugman who has become a true believer on all matters primally tribal. But nothing could compare to Sally Kohn’s report in today’s Salon.

How blindly tribal has our tribe become? This is Kohn, rejecting conservatives’ support of gay marriage unless they let her write the speech in which they explain their support:

KOHN (3/16/13): While I’m genuinely thrilled that more and more Republicans are coming out to support marriage equality, it’s important to consider why that is—because the ends may not justify the means. To the extent Republican support for gay marriage is based on imposing restrictive and regressive conservative social norms, it ultimately hurts gays—and all of us—more than it helps.

Sure, Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced his support for same-sex marriage because he wants equality for his own gay son, but Portman also rationalized his views within a conservative values framework. In an Op-Ed announcing his change of heart, Portman wrote that he supports allowing gay couples to marry because he is a conservative, not in spite of it...

Horrors! In explaining his support for gay marriage, Portman didn’t renounce his overall philosophy, such as it is. To Kohn, this means that our tribe may be better off renouncing his support.

She's genuinely thrilled by the growing conservative support for gay marriage. But we might be better without it! To see Kohn thrash around for sources of tribal outrage, just fight your way through her full piece.

(Careful! Your lizard brain will tell you she's right.)

Kohn has often been like this. Meanwhile, Salon has been working very hard to become a dumber version of Fox. But the impulse displayed by Kohn takes us to the next level of tribal nihilism.

Portman has come out in support of gay marriage—but Kohn doesn’t like the way he did it! Beyond that, Portman’s a hypocrite, as we all know—unlike the Pure of Heart Obama, who came out in support of gay marriage less than one year ago.

Unlike pure of heart Hillary Clinton, who came out last week.

The ultimate sign of tribal death is put on display by Kohn. It occurs when you go all the way around the bend—when you assume that your guy does the things he does for the finest of reasons, while their guy’s support can’t be accepted under any circumstance short of tribal surrender.

We liberals have played versions of this dumb, ugly game concerning gay marriage before. Remember when Olbermann was trashing the young (conservative) beauty queen because she stated the same position Obama was stating concerning gay marriage?

Olbermann was very ugly about it, in the most familiar old ways; a group of those “liberal intellectuals” saw how misogynist he was being. But they were only willing to say this if they could do so in private! To refresh yourself, just click this.

This is way our sorry tribe rolls once it stops its nap in the woods. We’re inclined to have deeply tribal minds—minds that are much like theirs.