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I like Goldberg. He's a talented writer and consistently interesting. He is, I believe, wrong here. The mainstream media has been the driving force behind the, well, mainstreaming of homosexuality. The mainstream media and the liberal politics that animated its coverage and institutional culture are dying. And with it so will the push for homosexual rights.

Homosexuality contravenes the Natural Law. I don't care how many protest marches you have, how many banners you make, how many television shows you produce, it is fundamentally against Nature. And you can only rebel against Nature for so long before the inevitable regression to the mean.

The reason most people have been ignoring this fundamental reality for the last thirty or so years was that the mainstream media had permanent control of the microphone and pushed this agenda foursquare, and thereby short-circuited the inborn aversion that most have to this behavior. They can no longer enforce this orthodoxy, and therefore the media culture will begin to more accurately track the natural distaste for this behavior. Media such as talk radio, the internet and the emerging cable news media take their ideas from the bottom-up; they do not project them from the top-down. It will be impossible to stop a public airing of people's distate for this behavior in the new media, nor will it be possible to flog people who object to this perversion with the tolerance stick. It's only a matter of time.

That also raises a point here that NRO raised itself a few weeks back, and that is the issue of 'metropolitan conservatism'. I read something on NRO's "The Corner" by Goldberg about a week ago about how his father never had a driver's license because he always used NYC public transit. This is typical of big-city living, of course. A lot of my friends who live in Chicago proper don't have cars. But this underscores, I think, a very real split not only in the conservative movement, but really in the country. I grew up in semi-rural Nebraska and was driving when I was 14. I was shooting a .22 when I was 10 or so. Even though I now live on the outskirts of a large city (Chicago), I'm pretty much 110% red-state in outlook. The social structure of the town I grew up in was heavily traditionalist Catholic/conservative Lutheran, and there were all kinds of unspoken cultural rules you had to abide by. Everyone more or less new everone else, there was a defined community, and so on. In big cities, it's completely the opposite. Living is somewhat impersonal, people are far more brusque, and tolerance of deviant behaviors is really not an option. So many freaks and deviants live in major cities that you really can't avoid them, so you learn to deal with them or at least ignore them. Of course, one of the reasons that there are so many deviants living in large cities (no, not everyone who lives in a large city is a deviant, of course) is that they leave places like my hometown as soon as they can to escape the informal cultural norming.

So, even though I'm about the same age as Goldberg and vote for the same people and hold much of the same politics, people like he and I will never have the same perspective on social issues. The middle and south of this country will never accept gay marriage. People who are ambivalent about the abortion issue will get hot over this in ways that may exceed the abortion debate. Acceptance of homosexuality is far from a fait accompli. And because the left-wing media no longer has the power to shoe-horn it into the public consciousness unopposed, the idea that the game's over and that's that I think is overstating it.