THEY SAY COMPASSION IS A VIRTUE, BUT I DON'T HAVE THE TIME

Mistermix flags this Glenn Greenwald tweet:

Is there a big difference b/w Portman switching on gay marriage b/c of his son & Obama because of his gay friends? abcnews.go.com/Politics/trans…

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 16, 2013

The huge difference is that Obama talked about friends, while Portman is talking about a member of his immediate family. It's appropriate that Matt Yglesias is using the word "narcissism" in reference to Portman's change of position, while Jonathan Chait is using the word "selfishness" -- those two words refer to the self, and Portman is talking about his son's life rather than his own, but children are extensions of the self in a way that friends aren't.

The notion of the family is also a cudgel the right has traditionally used, not just in its culture wars, but also in its economic war. It's not for nothing that GOP predidential nominee Bob Dole said this in his 1996 Republic convention speech, alluding to the title of a book Hillary Clinton had published earlier that year:

The state is now more involved than it has ever been in the raising of children, and children are now more neglected, abused, and more mistreated than they have been in our time. This is not a coincidence. This is not a coincidence, and, with all due respect, I am here to tell you, it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.

Rick Santorum also wrote a book called It Takes a Family. To right-wingers, liberals believe in government and conservatives believe in the family. Liberal social policies are deemed anti-family; liberal budget policies are regarded as contrary to the way you run your family's budget; government debt, which is blamed exclusively on liberals, is portrayed as especially evil because it places a burden on children and grandchildren. Families get deprived by the "death tax." Families are where homeschooling takes place. And on and on.

Conservatives don't talk about friends because that risks getting into the dangerous area of potentially ascribing moral worth to people whose views are different from your own. To conservatives, political virtue derives from monocultures -- like-minded families; like-minded Christian, conservative, anti-tax, pro-gun communities; ideologically monochromatic red states.

That's why Portman is getting some pushback from fellow conservatives:

Religious conservatives reacted strongly to Mr. Portman on Friday, with some saying that he had turned his back on Christianity. "Senator Portman speaks like so many who call themselves Christians but actually don't spend much time dwelling on the Word of God," wrote Erick Erickson, the conservative commentator, on Twitter.

Others were harsher. The Traditional Values Coalition, a religious group that is often vocal on gay issues, issued a statement that equated homosexuality with drunken driving and mocked Mr. Portman, writing, "My child is a drunk driver and I love him."

He's defined his family as a community with diverse ideas. That's not acceptable on the right.

What Portman should have done was approach this subject the way Dan Quayle approached abortion. In 1988, Quayle shocked a lot of non-conservatives (but shored up his right-wing bona fides) when he told an eleven-year-old interviewer for a childen's TV show that he didn't believe she should have the right to an abortion even if she were impregnated by her father. Four years later, CNN's Larry King asked Quayle what he'd do if his then-thirteen-year-old daughter were pregnant and sought an abortion. Quayle said he "would counsel her and talk to her and support her on whatever decision she made" -- a position that sounded to a lot of people like a belief in choice. Quayle went on to say that he was still anti-abortion -- an assertion that sounded to a lot of people like "I'm pro-choice for my family, just not for yours." But that was fine with the right, which never stopped admiring Quayle.

Portman should have said he loves his son and will support him if he gets gay-married -- but he still opposes gay marriage. I think that the right would have found that perfectly acceptable.