Gay marriage

Edit: Hi! Sorry I've been absent for so long, I've just been really sick. A bacterial infection in my throat has spread to my lymph nodes and I'm going to have to have my tonsils out in a few weeks. I did want to pipe up about marriage rights in Vermont, though, as it's a very hot topic right now. Here I'm re-posting mostly some old entries because I'm not well enough to write much new right now. The dehumanizing attitude opponents take terrifies me - dehumanization is the first step in any prejudice, and prejudice leads not just to social and legal inequalities but individual acts of discrimination and violence. Any student of history or psychology knows this. It makes me so sad.

The problem I have with opponents of gay marriage is not so much that are anti-gay marriage - honestly, I am not blindly intolerant of viewpoints which oppose my own just so long as they are least thoughtful and reasoned. I even respect people who admit that they don't like gay marriage because homosexuality makes them uncomfortable - at least those people are being honest and not trussing up their discomfort in erudite pseudo-Biblical and/or pseudo-scientific bullshit. This is what most opponents do. Their entire platform is built on obtuse logical fallacies. Philosophy professors could use their websites and propaganda as an extra credit assignment for their students: how many classic abuses of logic can you find?

1. Argumentum ad antiquitatum: This is the invalid assertion that just because something is old or traditional it is what's best. Not based on any other supporting evidence, just old-ness. If this held true then women would still be unable to vote or own property.

2. The Bogus Dilemma: Fabrication of dire consequences. If you do _____, X, Y, and Z will happen! It's a pseudo-factual declaration that by choosing the contested action you are also accepting the dreadful X, Y, and Z as consequences. Even though the speaker cannot furnish any evidence that X, Y, and Z will ever exist outside of his or her fevered imagination.

3. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc and post hoc ergo propter hoc: These are two ways in which loads of people, whether through ignorance or malice, misuse statistical data. The former is the false conclusion that two phenomena are linked because they occur simultaneously, the second concludes a link because of sequence - both fail to mention any explanatory relationships between the phenomena other than that which the asshole advocates. Here's an example:

Wherever Buffy Summers goes, murder, violence, and mayhem spontaneously arise.
Obviously Buffy Summers causes murder, violence, and mayhem.
Therefore, if we eliminate Buffy Summers there will be no more murder, violence, and mayhem.

This is falsely concluding causality. We all know that Buffy is not the 'cause' of mayhem, she is reacting to it. But if you feared violence and mayhem and had no other information than that presented by the imaginary anti-Buffy person above, you might find their points persuasive.

There is a famous joke one encounters when studying correlational coefficients:

"Most people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post -
for support rather than illumination."

If you know how to abuse statistics you can "prove" just about anything by falsely equating correlation with causation and extrapolating therewith to serve your agenda. Unfortunately most audiences don't know enough about statistics to demand context and follow-up when someone produces what appears to be an inarguable doozy.

4. I was once spammed by an anti-gay marriage group with this beautiful plurium interrogationum:

"I would like you to reflect for a moment on a simple truth which has not been much discussed relative to same-sex marriage. In truth, ALL same-sex parented families are defined by two primary characteristics - rejection, and deprivation:

1) By the rejection of one biological parent by the other (often by divorce, and often accompanied by rejection of the child by one biological parent).

2) By depriving the child of a mother or a father.

I am assuming that you support same-sex marriage. If so, then you would be supporting the legal enforcement, as a normative institution, of a family structure defined by rejection and child deprivation. We ask you to reflect on this readily observable fact, and ask yourself - do you truly believe that this would be in the best interest of children and society?"

Plurium interrogationum is a "loaded question". It's a question which is posed in such a way that the respondent must concede an embedded false presupposition in order to answer. In order to answer that last question there, you are agreeing to their original "simple truth" that "... ALL same-sex parented families are defined by two primary characteristics - rejection, and deprivation...". No family is inherently "defined" by a couple of simplistic characteristics. That makes no sense and forcing loaded questions from a false and malicious premise is dangerous, dishonest, and childish.

According to this particular false presupposition we should outlaw adoptions and single parent households, too.


Aside from the gross logical errors, they also conveniently ignore the separation of church and state by delving into Biblical territory. First of all, marriage as a relgious institution eqists separately from marriage as a legal bond. Your Bible must not shape laws! The founders of our country specifically forbade it! Second, the scant handful of mentions of homosexual behavior are all in the Old Testament along with a barrage of other nutso rules like:

• Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.
• Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.
• If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father or his mother, and his blood will be on his own head.
• If a man lies with a woman during her monthly period and has sexual relations with her, he has exposed the source of her flow, and she has also uncovered it. Both of them must be cut off from their people.
• No one outside a priest’s family may eat the sacred offering, nor may the guest of a priest or his hired worker eat it. But if a priest buys a slave with money, or if a slave is born in his household, that slave may eat his food.
• Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.

All taken from Leviticus. If someone claims that it says homosexuality is a sin in the bible, ask them if they are adhering to all of the other rules, too. Like never wearing cotton/poly blend clothing. Like being allowed to own slaves and will them to your kids?? Here's another heartwarming Leviticus tale (24:10-23):

10 Now the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and a fight broke out in the camp between him and an Israelite. 11 The son of the Israelite woman blasphemed the Name with a curse; so they brought him to Moses. (His mother’s name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri the Danite.) 12 They put him in custody until the will of the Lord should be made clear to them.

13 Then the Lord said to Moses: 14 “Take the blasphemer outside the camp. All those who heard him are to lay their hands on his head, and the entire assembly is to stone him. 15 Say to the Israelites: ‘If anyone curses his God, he will be held responsible; 16 anyone who blasphemes the name of the Lord must be put to death. The entire assembly must stone him. Whether an alien or native-born, when he blasphemes the Name, he must be put to death.

17 “ ‘If anyone takes the life of a human being, he must be put to death. 18 Anyone who takes the life of someone’s animal must make restitution—life for life. 19 If anyone injures his neighbor, whatever he has done must be done to him: 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. 21 Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death. 22 You are to have the same law for the alien and the native-born. I am the Lord your God.’ ”

23 Then Moses spoke to the Israelites, and they took the blasphemer outside the camp and stoned him. The Israelites did as the Lord commanded Moses.

Isn't that sweet? They stoned someone to death for blasphemy. I take it the same Holy Rollers who condemn homosexuality on a Biblical basis still do all this stuff, right? It's a Bible, not a buffet table. You can't just pick the parts that serve your agenda and ignore the rest. Doing so makes you appear nothing but an ignorant bigot. If you discard the rest of the Old Testment rules as being antiquated and culutrally irrelevant, than the bans on homosexuality go along with them. You foolish, evil, zealots.