A commenter named NorthDallas30 has stirred up some intense debate on this blog. That’s useful. We’ve seen previously that the more explicitly our opponents state their positions, the easier it is to dismantle their reasoning. ND30 has some utility because he offers up a common straw-man caricature of our beliefs and tries to use it against us. That gives us a chance for target practice.
For instance, he insists our arguments for marriage equality would also legitimize things like adult-child marriage. He defies us to prove otherwise, and insists we abide by the following rules that we ourselves supposedly established.
1) You must prove how your own relationship is negatively affected by people marrying children, animals, multiple people, cousins, etc.
2) You are not allowed to use any form of moral disapproval
3) You are not allowed to invoke majority rules or laws
4) You have no right to deny anyone else marriage to the person they love or the companion of their choice.
These are all nonsense, but I’ll start with the last one because it’s the most pernicious.
4) You have no right to deny anyone else marriage to the person they love or the companion of their choice.
I’ve heard people go into rhetorical overload and say this as hyperbole, but I never said it myself, so I was stunned when he claimed I had actually “stated” that “everyone has the fundamental Constitutional right to marry whatever or whomever they ‘love.’” I asked him to point where, and he failed. Instead, he pointed to Ted Olson’s opening statement in the Prop 8 trial, which I had linked to and called a “lovely read.”
Ignoring ND30′s misuse of the verb, “to state,” did Olson really say “everyone has the fundamental Constitutional right to marry whatever or whomever they ‘love’”? Or, as ND30 put in a comment on this blog,
…being called “degenerates, targeted by police, harassed in the workplace, censored, demonized, fired from government jobs, excluded from our armed forces, arrested for their private sexual conduct, and repeatedly stripped of their fundamental rights by popular vote” automatically means that laws preventing such people from marrying are wrong.
I added the emphasis, because “automatically” is the part he’s dishonestly sneaking in. It’s ironic that he points to Olson’s opening statement for this, because Olson disproves ND30′s point. In his opening statement, Olson promised to establish three things:
- Marriage is a vitally important good.
- Excluding same-sex couple from marriage excludes them from that good, and in fact does them harm.
- Proposition 8 perpetrates this harm for no good reason.
Olson’s argument stands on these three legs, and item 3 is crucial: Olson acknowledges his burden to show there is no good reason for Prop 8. Why? Because even rights explicitly guaranteed in the Constitution are rarely absolute. We have freedom of speech, but not the right to incite violence. We have free exercise of religion, but not the right to perform human sacrifice.
Olson knows that, of course, so he takes his three-pronged approach seriously. Read the trial transcript, and you’ll find he spends much time establishing the harm done to gay and lesbian families (he even gets the opposing side’s star witness to agree). And far from arguing it doesn’t matter whether there is good reason for Prop 8, he devotes considerable effort to demolishing the ban’s supposed rationales.
In other words, with this three-pronged strategy Olson acknowledges there can be good reason for banning some types of marriage, and accepts responsibility for knocking down the alleged good reasons for Prop 8. That’s about as far as you can get from saying that, “You have no right to deny anyone else marriage to the person they love or the companion of their choice.”
At this point we should thank ND30, because he’s shown us the dangers of over-the-top rhetoric. He’s also readied us to correct ridiculous caricatures of pro-equality legal reasoning.
Now let’s quickly dismiss ND30′s other points. Read more…
