Ten Q&A on Same-Sex Marriage Canards and Evasions

American Thinker ^ | 04/06/2013 | Stella Morabito

[SeekAndFind]

Forces pushing for genderless marriage are a wellspring of fallacies and unanswered questions about the consequences. Let's explore some of them.

1. What's love got to do with it?

Nothing. Romanticizing this debate by claiming that any two people in love should have a civil right to civil marriage is a foolish distraction. Neither judges nor legislators have any business discussing "affection" as a factor in defining civil marriage. Clergy who bless marriages have a legitimate and separate role in discerning the internal dynamics of couples. But not the state.

2. What is the state's interest in marriage?

First, to recognize the union that produces the state's citizens. Second, to encourage those who sire and bear the citizens to take responsibility for rearing them together. That's all, folks. Proponents of genderless marriage often answer this question with non sequiturs such as property rights (irrelevant), civil rights (extraneous to the question), and "love and stability" (not a function of state involvement).

3. Why should state interest in marriage be about children if not all marriages produce children?

It's thoroughly irrelevant that many heterosexual couples lack children because of intent, infertility, age, or health. Claiming that this is relevant to the case for genderless marriage suggests the "fallacy of composition": inferring that something must be true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. Citizens of the state can exist only through the female-male union, no matter how the union occurs -- whether traditionally, artificially, or in a petri dish. That's the only fact that provides any grounds for state interest in marriage.

[Monorprise]

Very good, if we had honest lawyers interested in actual justice they would make such an argument. In their sted we must in the only arena in which we are allowed to speak, the political arena.

[Albion Wilde]

Excellent article. Thanks for posting.

[jonno]

Required reading (found in the article comments):

“But thirty-five years [now 44] have passed since the infamous Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, the Lexington and Concord of the gay liberation movement. During that time, homosexuals have carved out for themselves public spaces in every major American city, and many of the minor ones as well. They have had the chance to create whatever they wanted in those spaces, and what have they created? New spaces for locating sexual partners. —”

The Truth About the Homosexual Rights Movement
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3650#.UWB7zEpxboY

[longtermmemmory]

homosexuals have carved out exemptions for the fair housing act by advertising as sex fetish only appartment complexes and neigborhoods.

If someone set up a straight only complex, the homosexuals would have a hissy fit and run to the government with the aclu filing suits.

[fwdude]

It's refreshing to finally see core, logical arguments based in reality, not politics.

And thanks to the author for exposing this fallacy often posted here by "libertarian" FReepers.

7. How about we just "get the state out of the marriage business" altogether?

This is a silly slogan that actually invites the government to regulate our personal associations on a scale we've never before witnessed. Libertarians like to discuss "privatizing" marriage, but we should smell a big fat government trap here.

State recognition of marriage serves to ensure the autonomy of the family, which in turn serves as the greatest buffer zone between the individual and the power of the state. If civil marriage is abolished, all families instead become partnerships subject to contract law, with the state ever more aggressively defining and regulating those contracts. And how can we expect the government to respect family autonomy if we no longer require the government to recognize it?