In a recent essay for the New Republic, titled “Elite Conservatives Have Taken an Awfully Weird Turn,” Graham Gallagher cites a post I wrote back in January as evidence of the apparent weirdness and radicalism of today’s intellectual Right:
Women’s and reproductive rights are areas where meme-infused weirdness and actual policy align to set the right against most American voters. When right-wing writers like National Review’s Nate Hochman argue that no-fault divorce was “a tragic mistake” (a view shared by numerous other far-right figures), he is not only embracing a position outside the bounds of conventional American life but one that is deeply politically unpopular, opposed by at least four-fifths of Americans. The activist right’s legal alternative is “covenant marriage,” which allows divorce only under extreme circumstances like felony conviction or child abuse.
But here’s the actual sentence that Gallagher’s out-of-context quotation of my piece is lifted from:
As for no-fault divorce, it’s not entirely clear that the policy — while a tragic mistake, from the social-conservative perspective — actually features prominently in the mainstream Right’s priorities. (Which Republican is campaigning on repealing no-fault divorce?)
If Graham’s argument was simply that I view the legalization of no-fault divorce as a mistake, then I’m guilty as charged — I still believe what much of America believed about marriage and the legal permission structure surrounding divorce up until a couple of decades ago. But in context, the argument I made in the post is actually the opposite of the way Gallagher frames it: Whereas he uses the three-word quote, attributed to me, to paint a picture of a rising tide of sinister right-wing extremism, my “while a tragic mistake” clause was in the middle of a sentence making the point that such a policy is not a serious conservative priority today. That question is, for all intents and purposes, settled. Even if Gallagher can’t abide the thought that there are still some in America who view that development as a net negative, he should at least be honest in his representation of the arguments they make.