I don’t disagree with Yuval Levin’s point about Burke’s distinction between "reformation and "change." It’s what I was trying to express this way:
[Conservatism] is about a modesty toward what problems government can ever solve. Its responses to emergent questions will not be an attempt to "solve" them, but to ameliorate them with a narrow set of tools.
There is a distinction between tackling problems pragmatically in order to maintain a coherence in a society as it changes over time – and the liberal notion that any given human problem can be definitively "solved." Burke expressed it better, of course, and Yuval’s quote is well worth a read.
I used the climate change example – an attempt to address a pressing problem without claiming to definitively solve it, or expanding government’s reach still further in overly elaborate and ambitious regulatory schemes. The same perspective informs my own view of marriage reform.
I see including gay couples within the existing institution – which already defines gays’ own families, parents and siblings – as the truly conservative position. Constructing a new institution, such as domestic partnership, is, in contrast, fraught with unintended consequences, as it offers to heterosexuals a marriage-lite institution which is a much bigger threat to marriage than allowing gay people into it. This is a debatable proposition, of course. But it is frustrating to have one Burkean approach defined as leftist or radical or anti-family. It isn’t. And the AIDS era showed many of us the consequences of not providing any social support for stable gay relationships in the modern world.
The Dish 