by G5000 » Mon Dec 10, 2012 4:30 pm
Let's break down every objection to gay marriage I have seen on the tubes...
1. Tradition. Frequently phrased as, "We don't want to redefine marriage". This is just another way of saying, "We have always discriminated against gays", and is not that is not a rational reason for continuing a harmful practice. Besides, marriage was redefined in my own lifetime already. It used to be two people of the same race. Loving v. Virginia changed all that.
Whining that gay marriages should be called something else besides a "marriage" would be allowing the bigots to define marriage, and that just cannot be done. Should we call interracial marriages "civil unions" to keep the bigots happy? Hell no!
2. By far the most popular argument against gay marriage is that if we allow homosexual to marry, then we will have to allow brothers to marry sisters, humans to marry animals, and adults to marry children. I have rarely been in a discussion involving gay marriage in which someone did not bring up either incest, or bestiality, or pedophilia, or two or more of these.
This is the slippery slope fallacy. And the reason it fails is because you cannot use the legalization of a harmless behavior as justification for the legalization of a harmful behavior.
Since pedophilia and the myriad other attempted equivalencies to homosexuality are all harmful behaviors, they cannot be justified by gay marriage any more than they can be justified by a heterosexual marriage.
The underlying irrational foundation behind this argument is nothing more than an intense dislike of man-on-man sex, even though one is not even participating in that act!
3. “Show me where the right to marry is in the Constitution”. This is probably the second most common argument. It is actually a one-size-fits-all argument used in many debates, not just the gay marriage debate. “Show me were (fill in the blank) is in the Constitution.” Its users believe it is a debate ender, but it really only exposes their ignorance of the Constitution.
Government has created benefits and privileges specific to married couples in the laws. The benefits and privileges therefore have the protection of the law. If you file a married federal income tax return, for example, you are exercising one of those privileges.
The 14th amendment specifically states that one must provide “equal protection of the laws”. Therefore, if you extend a privilege or benefit to one married couple, you must extend it to all married couples. Be they a white/white marriage, or a black/white marriage, or an opposite gender marriage, or a same gender marriage.
So the “show me where the right to marry” Constitutional question is a logical fallacy known as a false premise, and not a very clever one at that.
4. AIDS. Homos are sick bastards who screw like rabbits and spread AIDS and boy won’t it be great once they have wiped themselves out. Heteros are not as depraved as homos, because AIDS is killing more homos than straight people. QED.
There are two answers to this. First, on a worldwide level, heteros are greatly outpacing homos in the AIDS category, hands-down. But we ignore this because, hey, we’re talking about jungle bunnies in Africa, right? And you really don’t want to go there, gay-lover!
Second, syphilis. It seems some people are ignorant of the fact that syphilis was the AIDS of its time, until very recently. And syphilis killed many, many millions of people. There is a long list of famous people taken down by syphilis. And syphilis is still with us today, and it has experienced a recent resurgence amongst heteros. Lucky for them there is a cure!
Not only that, married people actually have a decreased rate of STD transmission. So the "AIDS" argument is actually a good reason to allow gays to participate in marriage.
So this idea that AIDS is some kind of vindication of the purity of heteros compared to the depravity of homos is ridiculously out of whack.
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We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. - Ronald Reagan