A Tard Fails to Think

I always have to remember that "secular" does not presume "enlightened," "intelligent" or "liberal" on the part of the holder of said belief that gays should not enjoy the right to be married:

1) Anti-Minoritarianism. The majority has rights, too.

Which are not harmed or limited. You have the freedom to marry. Nobody is taking that away from you. And when rights compete, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. So, while you have the right to whine, and nobody will take that from you, you don't have the right to hit the lives of others with your bigotry. Even though you think you do.

And, btw, one of the primary purposes of the Constitution is to make sure the minority gets the rights of the majority. And even with our feet of clay, we've generally gotten there. Despite people like you.

(2) The social recognition of committed heterosexual bonding has been a constant for thousands of years. No-one of a conservative inclination wants to mess lightly with that. Counter-arguments like “so was slavery” are unconvincing, as the occasional slights suffered by homosexual couples are microscopic by comparison with the injustice of human beings buying and selling other human beings. Gay marriage proponents make much of the cruelty and injustices of the past. I must say, though, being old enough to remember some of that past, I am unimpressed. I was in college in the early 1960s. There were homosexual students, and nobody minded them. They seemed perfectly happy. Certainly they were not ”beaten and brutalized”; and if they had been, I assume the ordinary laws of assault and battery would have come into play. I can recall even further back, known homosexual couples keeping house together in my provincial English home town in the 1950s. People made jokes about it, but nobody bothered them — though sodomy was illegal in England at the time! I don’t think private consensual acts should be illegal; but that aside, I don’t see much wrong with the mid-20th-century dispensation, based as it was on the great and splendid Anglo-Saxon principle of minding your own business.

That's a fallacy -- Argumentum ad antiquitatem. We've always done it thus, therefore it is the way it must be. You would make as much sense arguing for the abolition of airplanes because "if God wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings and we walked for thousands of years..."

(3) There really is a slippery slope here. Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose futher redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team? Are all private contractual relations for cohabitation to be rendered equal, or are some to be privileged over others, as has been customary in all times and places? If the latter, what is wrong with heterosexual pairing as the privileged status, sanctified as it is by custom and popular feeling?

Another fallacy, which you kindly points out by using its name: The Slippery Slope. This argument states that should event X occur, so will other harmful events even though there is no casual connection or proof that X will cause Y. For example:

"If we legalize marijuana, then more people would start to take crack and heroin, and we'd have to legalize those too. Before long we'd have a nation full of drug-addicts on welfare. Therefore we cannot legalize marijuana."

Ironically, this is the very argument used to criminalize marijuana and keep it criminalized. Yet, countries that have decriminalized marijuana have not seen the slippery slope under their feet. Rather, quite to the contrary.

(4) If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.

An appeal to bigotry? I don't even know where this incredibly bigoted, moronic fallacy is coming from. If we all had IQs of 120 or higher, the author might get his foolish self laughed at even more than he is...

(5) Human nature exists, and has fixed characteristics. We are not infinitely malleable. Human society and human institutions need to ”fit” human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it. Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us. It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.” There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding. This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.

People made this argument about the Divine Right of Kings. They've made this argument about slavery. And homophobia is not a rooted condition in the nature of man. I've never been a homophobic. My children aren't homophobes. My wife is not a homophobic. The condition stems from conservative, controlling religions and societal indoctrination of those values into its members.

(6) There is a thinness in the arguments for gay marriage that leaves one thinking the proponents are not so much for something as against something. How many times have you heard that gay marriage is necessary so that gay people will not be hindered in visiting a hospitalized partner? But if hospitals have such rules — a thing I find hard to believe in this PC-whipped age — the rules can be changed, by legislation if necessary. What need to overturn a millennial institution for such trivial ends?

Then the same thinness, but for your ignorance of it, applies to heterosexual relationships. But, for the record, it's more than hospital rules. It's about equality, real equality in society, not your "separate but equal" equality. After all, as we all know, "separate but equal" only means "separate."


I see Andrew Sullivan has found the original article. He doesn't go far enough.

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c45669e201157060d349970b