The Peter Lindsay at the Atlanta Journal editorializes thusly…

When we think of what governments should legitimately do —- provide police and fire protection, build roads and lighthouses, defend borders —- the idea of sanctioning marriage immediately sticks out as an anomaly, all the more so for those who wish to keep government’s activities to a minimum.

…

Unlike religious bodies, however, governments need to tread cautiously. That fact is especially true in America, where religious and moral commitments are widely viewed as private matters. This is not a partisan claim: Conscientious members of both parties would surely reject the idea that we can use the state to foist our deeply held beliefs on our fellow citizens.

And yet, affirming through law the sanctity of heterosexual marriage does just that. In essence the state is anointing an “American way” of intimacy, and it is difficult to imagine how the real American way could be any more imperiled.

No, no, no.  You don’t get it.  Conservatives like to Claim they’re in favor of limited government, but as we’ve see for the past eight years, when they’re in power that’s not exactly the kind of government you get.

This isn’t rocket science.  All it takes, is a little historical perspective.  Conservatives started yap, yap, yapping about limited government, around the time of the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s.  More to the point, around the time the hated Warren court started knocking down racial segregation laws.

That was when limited government gained their favor.  When government was busy telling black people where they could and could not eat, where they could and could not live, what schools they could and could not get an education in, and who they could and could not marry, big, invasive, intrusive, all powerful government was just fine with them.

You look at the old guard today and what do you see?  If they’re old enough, you usually see a segregationist.  That’s not hyperbole, it’s a fact.  They’re the ones who fought tooth and nail against racial equality, and when Johnson signed the civil rights act, bolted in droves to the republican party.  The young bloods of the movement grew up after those battles had been fought, so none of them have a history of standing in front of school house doors or ranting against race mixing.  But scratch most of them and you’ll find the same pusillanimous attitudes toward race their philosophical fathers had.  And the grass roots are still living back in the segregated fifties.

Isn’t it staringly obvious that if none of this were true, republican party conventions wouldn’t be so goddamned white?  The joke at the last convention was that you only saw black people on the convention floor after the show was over and the clean-up crew came out.  All this rhetoric about limited government came about, after the federal government stopped being their race cop, and started tearing down all the "whites only" signs.  Then they suddenly saw the value of limited government.  Or more specifically, government that was too weak to assure that the darkies could share in the American Dream too.  When they say they want to get government off the people’s backs, what you have to understand is by ‘people’ they mean white people.  Rich white people.

Ronald Reagan didn’t begin his campaign for the white house in the town where three civil rights workers were murdered,  with a speech on "state’s rights" accidentally.  And what Reagan began once he got into the white house, George Bush devoted himself to with gusto.  George Bush Was the climax of the American conservative movement.  The government he ushered in, of privilege, theocracy and cronyism, was Exactly the government they had dreamed of, ever since Earl Warren’s supreme court issued Brown v. Board of Education. It wasn’t what they’d advertised to the rest of the nation, but by the time Bush was ushered into power by enough conservative supreme court justices, they figured they had a racket going whereby they could mouth platitudes about limited government for the rubes, while dog whistling to the grass roots and that would keep them in power indefinitely.  It was going to be Karl Rove’s permanent republican majority.  The only problem was, the morons had eaten their own dog food about deregulation. 

Deregulation was never about freeing up the potential of the marketplace.  Like everything else about their limited government rhetoric, it was about getting government off the backs of the greedy so they could pillage to their heart’s content.  The sense of divine retribution here, comes from seeing how thoroughly they’d bamboozled themselves into thinking it would actually work…that a marketplace with no rules would actually have a different outcome then an implosion of worthless paper, backed by even more worthless paper.  The shock of seeing it all come crashing down in a whirlwind of fraud and deceit is pitifully real.  They seem to have forgotten for a moment, that they’d set out to line their own pockets with other people’s retirement money, not grow an economy. 

So…you’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives voted to write gay couples out of one state constitution after another are you?  You’re surprised at how many "limited government" conservatives want to enshrine their religious and moral beliefs in the constitutions of every state in the union are you?  Wise up. 

Wise up.

The republican bubble popped last election day, because it was always hollow inside.  They never wanted limited government.  What they wanted was an America where they were king and the rest of us knew our place and how they liked their shoes shined.  When government started treating all Americans equally, they set out to deliberately wreak it.  Limited government was their hatchet, by which they meant to do that.