The liberal time machine, part 1: same-sex marriage

Liberals have an odd tendency to artificially compress the timeline of history in order to exaggerate present-day burdens.

For example, Courtney Martin is a straight liberal who writes in The American Prospect about her refusal to get married as some sort of ill-advised protest against ... well, she seems to be protesting a huge cauldron of assorted social ills: racism, homophobia, gender roles, patriarchy... I'm getting worn out just listing all of America's evils.

What's Martin's problem with marriage? Click the link for the whole explanation, but this point is especially ludicrous:

I don't want to participate in an institution that's been historically sexist and currently discriminates against my gay friends, especially considering that my partner and I couldn't have been married in some states just 40 years ago (we're miscegenators)....

I can't think of a more glaring example of the tendency of liberals to willfully blind themselves to social progress. If one of your main gripes with society today is something that ended forty years ago, you're really lucky!

Martin's attempt to depict marriage as a racist institution despite Loving v. Virginia is unintentionally comical:

But the institution is still constructed in subtle ways to fit best with same-raced, preferably white, couples. Imagine a traditional wedding in which two white families are sitting on either side of the aisle. Now imagine a wedding in which one side is completely white and the other completely black. See the problem?

James Kirchik (the author of the above-linked blog post about Martin's article) has the right answer:

No, I don't. Sounds like a wonderful example of America's exceptional multiculturalism to me.

But even if you do have a problems with that specific tradition, don't blame the government -- blame ordinary people. They're the ones who choose to practice those traditions. The government doesn't care what you do.

If Martin really believes seating arrangements in interracial marriages are a "problem," she could just ... solve the problem by getting married without having "a traditional wedding." No one's forcing you to do things the way they're done in movies.

But that implies that she's arguing in good faith -- that she'd love to make society better, and has unfortunately been thwarted by the man. Well, that's hard to believe. For liberals like Courtney Martin, politics isn't about solving problems at all. It's about wallowing in them.