Inclusion = Progress?

While I'm burning DVDs, I'm reading my latest issue of GQ; in it, there is a short interview with presidential candidate, Senator McCain (R). Because I’m still deciding for whom I’m going to support for the ’08 Most Powerful Man on Planet Contest (yes, Hillary is welcome to the take a stab at becoming the most powerful man on the planet) I was interested in what the (light) article would uncover about McCain.

Even brushing his anti-war and biased interview techniques aside, the interviewer/reporter, Wil S. Hylton’s questions were chock full of illogical presuppositions.

One that comes to mind is his question to McCain about gay marriage.

He asks, “why do you define [marriage] as ‘between a man and a woman’?” McCain responds plainly and technically. “Because I believe it’s a unique status to them”, he says. “That’s what marriage means.”

“Why can’t the meaning be expanded? Isn’t progress about becoming more inclusive? Look at the Declaration and the words ‘all men are created equal.’ The word men referred to white male landowners. Today it refers to either gender, any race, any class. So these words have expanded in meaning, right?”

Seems logical doesn’t it? But does progress necessarily mean being more inclusive?

There is a modern misconception that progress is defined as “new”. “Moving forward” seems to be synonymous with “getting better” but it’s not. There are countless instances where newer products that are in the marketplace are inferior to the good-old-fashioned equivalents of the same product. Perhaps it was cheaper to produce or was produced faster for a better profit (and thusly “better” for the manufacturer) but it sure wasn’t better for the consumer (and, if you subscribe to the power of the free market, probably not better for the manufacturer in the long run, either.)

Likewise, many newer and more “progressive” ideas can actually be damaging.

The relatively new idea of equal access to all able-bodied or disabled Americans, for instance is good in most instances where it’s applied, but, in my opinion, damaging in this case where a woman sued Target.com because she can’t ‘see’ their website. I don’t believe it is the right of every citizen to have unabated access to the luxury of the World Wide Web. (At least not yet.)

And the even newer Nouveau American idea that all religions are equal, for instance, has done damage to the previously stated tradition/law that Americans of all abilities should have access to public services. Have you heard the case in Minnesota where Muslim cabbies are refusing to transport blind people and their Seeing Eye dogs?

So, for Hylton to assume that progress is synonymous with inclusiveness is like me assuming that “lighter is better”; it follows no line of logic and one has no relation to the other without a specific context.

Should the NBA become inclusive towards women in order to achieve progress? Should a zoo’s cobra display become inclusive towards small mammals in order to achieve progress? Should American citizenry offer identical voting rights to any citizen of any nation state in order to achieve progress? It’s ludicrous.

Yes, perhaps in the case where the Declaration of Independence definition of “man” in the phrase “all men are created equal” was expanded to include more than white male landowners, it could be considered progress. (Although, there is much to be debated here as well since the paragraph of the Declaration’s Preamble that Hylton is referring to was written to outline the human’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness through laws that are granted by governments of their own creation. It was, in no way a decree that all people should be treated as equals in spite of their background or current circumstance.)

But this is one case where inclusiveness can be considered progress. The trait of inclusiveness is only considered a virtue by Affirmative Action liberals who think everyone is entitled to a shot at the big time and no one should be left out of any specific classification. Hylton thinks that marriage should be expanded to same-sex partners as well. The very definition of marriage, from the time it was first instituted by mankind or ordained by God, it was meant to be for a man and a woman. By Hylton’s all-inclusivene/term-expansion theory, it could be argued that the term “male” should be expanded to include females because we shouldn’t exclude people based on gender and inclusiveness is, by definition, progress.