The problem is that the demands of conservatives are out of control. They utterly reject the power of the mind to reason to a plausible understanding of moral values and their application to complex circumstances. Conservatives only use reason to extend by remorseless logic the demands of their primal moral feelings. They do not see that their views, when pushed to their logical limits, are incoherent.

The Newtown murders are a perfect demonstration of that incoherence.

In our civil society, if something is legal for one, it just has to be legal for all. The bottom line is, everyone is equal under the law.

At least that’s how I see it.

Not so, it seems, for Lanae Erickson and Jon Cowan, two Third Way muckety-mucks who recently penned a piece for the Baltimore Sun in which they argued that if LGBT Americans want to see marriage equality become a reality, they need to make it less about equality and more about embracing what the authors see as traditional values.