"All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”
Unfortunately, this inherently innocuous notion serves as the basis point for all sorts of nastiness. When taken out of the utopian context, you will invariably have groups with disproportionate influence and power (whether qualitative or quantitative) to excerise what they feel is proper and timely "decency and drapery of life." For sure, there is a necessary balance for those ideas whose time has come and preserving "tradition." But just as every radical idea (yes, even at the expense that some individuals will lose out) does not deserve instant societal acceptance an implementation, neither should societal progression be rejected off-hand in the name of "tradition," because it is more often than not a mere euphemism for discrimination or the advancing of one group's particular agenda. There was a time, not so long ago, that "traditional" marriage meant that other than the gender difference, the betrothed were identical in color, race, creed, etc. Con arguments both leading up to and following one of the instances of our jurisprudence of which we should be most proud as Americans, undoubtedly carried "traditional," and in-fact, oft-respectable, elements (e.g., preservation of one's culture, etc.), but were largely thinly-veiled and abject racism. It is the characterization of that which may make the aforementioned groups uncomfortable, or in other words threaten their own self-proclaimed monopolies of virtue, that Burke characterizes as the "defects of our naked, shivering nature," or in other words what is most often the justification for guilt, shame and self-loathing of unexplored or incomprehensible characteristics of our own humanity propogated by many organized religions, certain "traditional" or "conservative" aspects of society.
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