Who fired first? Who has to fire last?

So in at least one sense Simon is right. It's the liberals always seeking to change the status quo that causes the battles, If liberals had only accepted that the original status quo of the conservatives was right, there's be no war. :-) So I guess, definitionally speaking, he's right. The liberals started it.

Taking it further, Simon is in a sense claiming that liberals, by virtue of whatever sucesses they have enjoyed, have become the de facto conservatives, seeking to conserve liberalism. That makes it all very confusing, doesn't it?

I think I'll agree to agree with Tully. It's CPD. If Simon wants to stick to his tit that liberals are dominating the culture war, I'll stick to my tat that conservatives invented it. Which is of course, nonresponsive, and what makes it such a great tat.

To be responsive this time, let's notice that currently, on each issue Simon describes, both wings wish to pull some aspect of our culture further toward their side. To my knowledge, certainly neither wing professes to be satisfied by the status quo, right? Yet for the most part, the great middle seems insufficiently moved to undertake such movements as the wings demand. Or at least they lack anything resembling the anger, urgency, and zeal of the wings. They go on about their lives trying to ignore such controversies.

On occasion they may be drawn into the fight and express heartfelt views, only to be pushed away by both the vitriol and the lack of obvious substantive compromise. IOW, most folks in the middle view it as more of a pointless energy drag than either wing, which views it as a matter of clear moral direction.

This suggests (to me at least) that the real status quo is largely a stalemate with frequent skirmishes between the wings. One which many wise and/or exhausted folks feel compelled to avoid. Simon's view is probably that even if it's a stalemate, the liberals have seized the most crucial real estate. And that's the thing. To a liberal, the middle is on the right, and to a conservative, it's on the left. If you are really in the middle in any sense, a conservative like Simon will ALWAYS tell you that you are on the left. Every time, unless you line up right behind him. From his perspective, it's obvious and incontrovertible.

Since I have had multiple experiences of being accused of being BOTH a right wing tool and left wing tool, I feel comfortable guessing that I must be in the middle. Basically, I'd be a lot more worried if Simon DIDN'T tell me I was on the left and not in the middle.

I should have capitalized the C and the L. ;) But I think even the most committed Burkeian/Oakeshottian small-c conservative would reject the proposition that conservatism always means embracing every aspect of the status quo, particularly when the status quo itself is profoundly new. Russian conservatives in 1917, for example, were not bad conservatives because they failed to transfer their loyalty to the Tsarist status quo to the Bolshevik status quo after the October revolution enthroned the latter (yes, I am aware that the Bolsheviks did not seize power directly from the Tsarist government, stop nitpicking). It would be incoherent to define "conservative" so narrowly that the beliefs of the conservative must change radically with every new law passed.

One of the principle problems with Burke and Oakeshott, it seems to me, is that they lacked (or failed to enunciate) a convincing freestanding principle to explain what imperatives might override the presumption in favor of adherence to the status quo, but it is clear, as I've previously suggested, conservatism - even at its most Burkeian - is not blind allegiance to whatever happens to be the status quo from moment to moment. Rather, conservatism embodies a degree fealty to tradition and continuity, which is a quite different proposition to the ever-changing status quo, and does not demand loyalty to a new and novel proposition which has broken into the world. "Tradition does tend to erect a rebuttable presumption that grows stronger with the passage of time; even when the traditional solution is less than ideal, it at least has the virtue of being tried and tested, and its unintended consequences have already become apparent. That isn't to say that change shouldn't happen, but that in my view, when you have a law and a proposed change, the latter must bear the burden of proof that it should be adopted, when they seem co-equal, the former prevails. The longer the law has been on the books [or the custom practised], the higher the burden of proof required [to abandon it]." By this metric, it may conceivably be possible to mount a conservative defense of Roe, for example - but that is certainly not the case today.

Slavery was an issue since before the formation of the Republic. I honestly have no idea when slavery in colonial America first became a controversial issue, so I can't honestly say that I know it was ever the universally-accepted status quo.

I'm still ancestrally annoyed about those monotheism and monogamy things...whippersnapper upstarts!

Truly, I'm not gonna run sides, I just wanted to point out for the umpteenth time that "conservative" and "liberal" are being used entirely as labels, and that the labels don't match the content. At least "radical" means what it says in both contexts.

Josh, Simon addressed gay marriage, not gay rights in general, so you're changing the subject there. Abortion was an issue well before Roe v. Wade, but it was a state issue and not a federal one. Until medicine caught on to antisepsis and such it carried its own potential death penalty, one requiring no adjudication. BTW, you can blame Hippocrates for the earlier prohibitions if you like--the Hippocratic Oath barred physicians from performing abortions (those that kept their oaths, anyway). But this one's NOT a nit--here you are completely and 100% unambiguously wrong:

Federal funding of stem cell research was not an issue until Bush vowed to veto such funding that already took place.

I'm afraid you have to go back to the Nixon Administration if you're looking for the initial ban on federal funding of embryonic cell research. 1973, in Congressional grandstanding resulting from Roe v. Wade. That legislative ban stood until the Clinton admin decided it was OK to permit federal funding of certain types of embryonic stem cell research, which immediately provoked Congress into passing the completely unambiguous Dickey Amendment of 1995, banning ALL federal funding of ESCR that resulted in the destruction of human embryos. Clinton later (2000) tried to slide around the Dickey Amendment and authorize such spending anyway by regulatory permissions to HHS, but the incoming Bush admin refused to let the altered regulations go through contra Dickey unless the research funding was confined to existing (cloned) embryonic stem cell lines. There was NO ongoing ESCR being legally done with federal funding when Bush came into office. Bush was actually the first president to authorize and deliver ANY federal funding for ESCR, but such funding was confined to existing cloned embryonic stem cell lines.

Them's the stubborn facts.

And you've proved the greater argument they're arguing that it IS a chicken/egg debate, by yourself arguing that legal tradition is responsible for creating the conditions. Which is precisely why I'm not gonna get into who threw the first punch, as it's a subjective circular argument with rhetorical merits either way. (Though I believe it was Og the australopithicene in 2,865,374 BC.)

Josh,
To add to Tully's reply (since he's covered the stem cell issue, I'll leave that aside) -

Prohibitions on abortion reach long back into the common law, and I'm not aware (although I haven't researched the point in any depth) of any pre-1066 polity, anywhere in the world, that explicitly permitted abortion. Texas was not the first state to criminalize abortion by statute, either - the first post-revolutionary statute that I know of, as Justice Rehnquist noted in his Roe dissent - was Connecticut, in 1821. But that enactment must be placed in context; as with most of the 36 jurisdictions adopting bans on abortion prior to the passage of the 14th Amendment (which is to say, virtually all of them, the growth of anti-abortion statutes in the early 19th Century reflected not a new trend in thinking on abortion, but rather, a growing legal trend: codification. The statutes were enacted to clarify and codify the pre-existing common-law understanding, not in derogation of it.

Anglo-American history from the 10th century to the 20th reflects an almost unbroken line of thought on abortion, wherein an abortion after quickening was a homicide, a traditional understanding which only grudingly began to change in the mid-20th century. As Tully notes, however, those changes were driven by liberals and were individualized developments in certain states (adopted, moreover, through legitimate democratic processes). The supreme inflaming act of usurpation came only in 1973 with the decision of Roe, which was certainly driven by liberals, and achieved the double word score of both moral iniquity and legal illegitimacy. Thus, on abortion, you cannot possibly contend that liberals did not make abortion an issue; even if you disclaim Roe as the opening shot, there is an unbroken Anglo-American legal and moral opprobrium against abortion that was disturbed at the instigation, not of conservatives, but of liberals.

As to gay marriage, I'm not sure what you're hoping to prove by saying that "the entire issue of gay [marriage] didn't even exist until the Court found anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in 2003." I had thought that you were trying to rebut my point that liberals dragged that issue, yet by citing Lawrence as the case animating that movement, you prove my point.

On both abortion and gay marriage, you lack a leg to stand on. Even if you're right that moral rectitude is on the side of liberals with regard to those issues, the fact that it was liberals that in the 20th century took up these causes in derogation of the longstanding traditions of Anglo-American civilization -- often pursuing them through fundamentally illegitimate means that vitiate whatever merits the movements might posses -- is in itself the case that liberals began the culture wars. You can argue that liberals are the morally right side in the culture wars, but what you cannot argue is that they didn't start them.