One song to the tune of another

William F. Buckley, Jr. attends the second inauguration of President Ronald Reagan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over at National Review, the frat boys are rattling the sticks in the swill buckets more clamorously than usual. It's fundraising time, after all, for the bastion of Anglo-Catholic conservatism and free markets that, since 1955, has never learned to make a profit.

All of which has led them to particular exertions to get people riled up. They've counterprogrammed an article with the subtitle, why we should favor gay marriage, for example, but it's no editorial endorsement. Just "we" somebody else, in the increasingly intolerant circles in which NR, First Things, and other pubs of their ilk runs (NR has gone so far as to run the marriage article at least twice on its Facebook timeline).

But such is not a majority view in the House of Buckley (A simpler mind, over at TownHall.com, took the article's placement seriously and has declared,

National Review apparently decided they didn't want social conservatives -- the third and largest leg of Reagan's famed three-legged stool -- to read their stuff anymore when they full-throated embraced the Rainbow Jihad. 

Racially-tinged commentaries and gay-baiting are old standbys; old scores, once totted up, are never settled. Since William Buckley for the diagnosis of HIV to come with the tattoo, "AIDS" ("Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals"), NR is always gonna come down on the side of conservative credentialists who love the perks of Ivy League alumni status (National Review Wine Club, anyone?) while denigrating what it stands for.

Which is how we see that, in a nice triple-bagger, NR writer Kevin Williamson can demolish the record of Robert Gates as secretary of defense (that'll learn ya to try and serve W. and Obama!) in the guise of attacking Gates' request that the Boy Scouts' ban on gay leaders be lifted, in the guise of being for having gay Scout leaders.

But it's all a head-fake. The nugget of Williamson's pro-gay Scout leaders' argument is that it doesn't, in fact exist:

There is, in fact, an excellent moral argument to be made for the inclusion of homosexual adults in leadership positions within scouting — but Gates is not making that argument.

And neither is Williamson. The rest of the article is about Gates at the Pentagon.

You'll have to guess what the right and true conservative position is. You won't learn it from NR.