What's Wrong With Andrew Sullivan?Gay Patriot West
asks the question.
His fall is a sad one. He was the first gay writer/speaker (with a national platform) to challenge the left-wing orthodoxy that pervades the gay community. And now he seems to have become a spokesman for that orthodoxy.The answer is a simple one. When it comes right down to it, the way we all analyze any news story has a lot more to do with trust than it does to the basic facts. When I see an article about the latest allegations of abuse at Gitmo, I tend to trust the soldiers. In my younger, more liberal days, I would probably have tended to trust the media, and distrusted the soldiers.
Andrew lost his way because he decided gay marriage was the single most important issue to him. He lost his trust in President Bush when the president endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment allowing states to ignore gay marriages performed in other states. As a result he sees almost every issue in terms of his trust or lack thereof.
We all do this. I trust President Bush; ergo when I read stories that reflect negatively on him, I'm always looking for the mistaken assumption or the assertion that disproves the article. Andrew does just the reverse.
