Andrew Sullivan is for gay marriage. Rod Dreher isn't sure.

But he is still very vocal and agitated about something.

Rod concludes his latest outreach in the mutual titty twister he and Sullivan are currently engaged in by nailing these theses to the bathhouse door:

I am glad we don’t live in that world anymore. We don’t live in that world anymore because people like Andrew insisted that gay lives had more dignity than the majority of Americans believed. Again, they did us all a favor by awakening us morally to what it is like to live in a country where what matters the most to you is treated in custom and in law as anathema. But I do not look forward to the world Andrew and his righteous allies are building for those religious people who do not conform. They will demonize dissent, and pat themselves on the back for their moral courage the whole time.

This perplexes conservative commenter Joseph Dooley, who writes

Not sure why Dreher comes out in favor of civil unions and tolerance of homosexuality. It’s a middle ground that is merely a transition stage between hedonism and Judeo-Christian civil society.

Conservative commenter Thursday is more direct:

I honestly do think America is a better place for what they’ve done, on the whole, because it has made us more tolerant and understanding.

I’ll be blunt: this is insane.

If a movement promoting gay sex (however monogamously practiced, or not, as the case may be) has somehow resulted in making American society morally superior to what it was before, then logically gay sex can’t really be that big of a deal. I mean it clearly has to be less of a sin than intolerance for that to be the case. And, if that’s true, then why exactly are we opposing gay marriage?

I mean really, if gay sex isn’t an utter abomination against nature, then what the hell are we doing making gay people suffer by denying them the ability to find love and get married? Are we opposing this for something we truly believe to be noble and pure, or just to be obstinate a**holes?

And if we give every indication that we don’t really believe gay sex to be a terrible sin, why shouldn’t gay rights people take our protests to the contrary all that seriously. Really, why shouldn’t they put the pressure on us to change? It does kind of look like we’re doing this out of pure bigotry.

P.S. A lot this post sounds like Stockholm Syndrome. I’ve said it before, the soft message sends out the impression that we don’t really believe what we say we believe, and so it may actually encourage more pressure and persecution.

Stockholm Syndrome. Now that's a really interesting take.

The liberal commenters in favor of SSM are just as befuddled by Dreher's fey coyness:

Beyond says:
 

[NFR: "Valid" = the state has the right to pass such laws;

Can you explain why the state has a right to regulate what you and your wife do in bed?

[NFR: Yes, I can explain it, but no, I don't care to get into this with you. -- RD]

BWAHAHA...WHAT kind of infantalism is THIS?

 'Yes I can explain superstring theory complete with full mathematical proofs, but no, I don't care to get into this with you.'

'Yes I can explain what advice I offered Obama and Putin in our three-way conference call, but no, I don't care to get into this with you.'

'Yes I can build a Boeing 777 Dreamliner using nothing but coffee cans, but no, I don't care to get into this with you.'

Chekhovian says:
 

[NFR: Yes, I can explain it, but no, I don't care to get into this with you. -- RD]

That’s disappointing. This is something I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on.

Beyond will do anything to get Dreher to say what he means about anything:

[NFR: Yes, I can explain it, but no, I don't care to get into this with you. -- RD]

If you do a thread about it, I promise I won’t comment. Others might find it fascinating.

Finally brought to heel like a small dog on a leash by Thursday
 

Judging by these bizarre Stockholm Syndrome-ish responses from the likes of our host here and Ross Douthat, I suspect that ordinary Christians are just going to have to have to show that we really do believe what we believe by suffering for it. That is something we can do for God, for God himself suffered far more for us.

Dreher moonwalks back, rolls over, belly up, and becomes even more passive, if that's even possible without simply imploding into his own orifices and vanishing entirely, now wanting to claim that he has just been an irenicist cruelly exploited as a useful idiot:

[NFR: You call it Stockholm Syndrome, but I really have known and loved, as friends, gay people for all my adult life. My oldest and closest friend is gay (and chaste; he's a believing Catholic). I believe gays have been badly mistreated; some still are. As a Christian, I genuinely want to be more compassionate in my dealings with them. It's not a suck-up or a put-on. What's happening, though, is that the militancy of the pro-SSM side makes people like Douthat and me look like suckers, and ends up empowering people who believe as you do, because you aren't fooled about what's coming. I don't agree with you about what a just outcome would be, but I'm becoming convinced now that relatively irenic Christians like me were and are useful idiots. -- RD]

Which, if nothing else, lays a whole bunch of chips on Thursday's Stockholm Syndrome theory.

So what in the world is going on here with Dreher? Why can't he find some gravitational ground, any ground, to plant his boots on with respect to gay marriage instead of flitting from one evanescent dewdrop to another like Tinker Bell?

Because he wants to be Andrew Sullivan - or at least, he wants to be the blogger Andrew Sullivan is.

(In the vernacular of the gay culture Sullivan inhabits Sullivan's known as a "top" - which means just what you think it means - while Dreher, well we've all read Dreher, and, really, Dreher could only be the complement to a "top", a "bottom". So Dreher can't really be Andrew Sullivan.)

Maybe Dreher doesn't really want Sullivan to hold him and stroke his hair gently, but he does want to write on the same things, to the same (including gay) people that Sullivan does, in the same way with only minor aesthetic twists (like avoiding anything which might pin him down).

For Pete's sake, he directly ripped off Sullivan's "View From Your Window" and repurposed it as his own "View From Your Table" (which we, in turn, have repurposed as "View From the Hood of Your Car". Speaking of which: after the Blue Rhino incident, we're going to need a new meetup place).

So, at the end of the day, he can't really hold to anything much different from Sullivan. That could only leave him contravening his own essence.

Or maybe all these parallels between Dreher and Sullivan are just me overthinking things once again, and the problem is that all we've been hearing from Dreher all along on this SSM thing is really no more than the outgassing of some sort of mock-Christian-flavored outrage porn, all show, no substance, and certainly no Christian principles.

In which case Sullivan calling out Dreher as an imitation "Christianist" instead of a true Christian may really be more honestly accurate and less of an insult than we first thought.