This piece was originally written in response to an opinion letter penned to the Minneapolis Star Tribune by one Mr. Riley Balling, an attorney (I’m assuming he has paperwork to back up that claim somewhere).
Balling’s point can be summed up in the following paragraph from his editorial: “For many of us who favor traditional marriage, marriage is about raising children in a healthy environment. Thus, any change to the definition of marriage affects our marriage. Our ‘traditional’ marriages and the children they produce are our greatest source of happiness, and we desire that our children will live in a world that will promote their ability to make the same choices that brought us happiness.”
You can find this piece at http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/171613511.html. If you don’t want to bother looking it up (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), he basically said, “WARGLEBLARGLE GAY PEOPLES ARE RUININ’ MY MARRIAGES” and then forgot to provide examples.
Dear Mr. Balling,
I read your opinion piece in today’s Star Tribune, and I would like to take a brief moment to offer you some assistance in your future writing endeavors. I can only assume that you’ve never been trained in classical logic, debate techniques, or basic empathy, so I will humbly offer my own meager knowledge in these fields as it relates to your literary masterpiece “Why Same-Sex Marriage Affects My Marriage.”
You start off strong, with an opening salvo ostensibly proclaiming that every group has the right to its own views (if we ignore the fearmongering subhead of the article, “The goal is to move society—in this case, away from a safe environment for children”), but then, much like a Michael Bay plot, your argument starts careening off the rails. Your first mistake is what is termed a mind-projection fallacy—the assumption that the way you see the world is the way the world really is.
You state, “As we have seen, and understandably so, people in homosexual relationships are trying to change society to more readily embrace and promote their view of their identity. This is possible largely due to the disassociation between sexual relationships and procreation.” But what you’re really saying is “Those gay people do sex things that I find icky, and we should oppress them because they can’t have babies.” You completely ignore the fact that homosexual people are trying to change society not just because they want to have teh butt secks (or rise and grind, for the ladies), but also because they want to avoid, oh, I don’t know, things like homosexuals being tortured and tied to a fence post until they die (Matthew Shepard), shot to death while attending school (Lawrence King), shot to death for being transgender (Moses King), committing suicide by hanging due to repeated bullying and taunting (Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover), shot to death and burned while standing military guard (Seaman August Provost), and stabbed to death after serving in the Vietnam War (James Zappalorti). Every single one of these attacks occurred because of the victim’s sexuality. Let’s not even get into the over eleven hundred federal benefits gay couples are legally unable to obtain in the state of Minnesota because they can’t get married—things like health care, survivor benefits, and legacies to pass on to their families (including children).
Deep breath.
Moving on, we come to the next little pearl of wisdom hidden in your manifesto, that hoary old chestnut of traditional marriage. In this case, you’ve made the logic error of the etymological fallacy: the assumption that the original or historical meaning of a word or phrase is necessarily similar to its current meaning.
Which version of the term traditional marriage would you like to use, Mr. Balling? Should we go back to ancient Israel and practice polygamy, in which the only right a woman had was the right to own her own tent? Or should we use the ancient Greek definition of marriage, one more concerned with inheritance than with love, one that forced a woman to divorce her current husband and marry a sibling if that was required to continue the family? Should we force a brother to marry his dead sibling’s wife? Or perhaps we should make arranged marriages with child brides; that’s certainly traditional enough. Wait, I know, let’s go with the one where you have to pay three goats and a cow in order to ensure the woman is yours to keep forever, and you can stone her to death if she cheats on you. That one sounds terrific!
You see, Mr. Balling, since you don’t actually provide a definition of the term traditional marriage, I think your definition of it boils down to “I want to make people who believe differently than I do miserable by taking away their free will, so I’ll cloak my hate in the guise of tradition and history without knowing what those words really mean,” and, well, I’m not really okay with that. Also, traditional marriage has traditionally been rather tough on 50 percent of the human population, what with the whole enslavement and forced-childbearing and stoning-to-death thing (I’m talking about women, if you haven’t figured it out [sorry to the people who figured it out like five minutes ago, but I wanted to make sure he got it]), and I’m not really okay with that either.
Deep breath. <whelps!>
Your third logic fallacy—and, oh boy, does this one crop up a lot—is that of cum hoc, ergo propter hoc. Now, I’m guessing your Latin may be a little rusty (although it may not be, in which case, well done!), so if you need help, I’d like to ask the entire class to say it along with me: CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION.
You can’t make the statement “Bless the single parents who try, but there is a direct correlation between single homes and crimes of all types” and not expect every moderately intelligent person to jump all over it. Single-parent homes don’t cause crime. That’s like saying, “I rode my bicycle to work today, and it rained, therefore my bicycle causes rain.” There are a multitude of factors related to crime, including income, residence location, public resources available, education, education available, age demographics, police presence, temperature patterns, et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum (which means I could go on for a while [also, way to take a giant steaming literary dump on every single parent, infertile couple, and those people who choose not to have kids; you’re making all sorts of friends today]). To single out single parents is, to put it bluntly, absolutely absurd.
And then, to make it even better, you manage to link an unsafe environment for children (somehow caused by single parents?) to same-sex marriage by claiming same-sex marriage “reinforces changes to the marital definition.” Hoo-boy. Tell me: Were you worried about the children when all those colored folks started marrying the white people? Because that sure was a change to the “marital definition,” and, funnily enough, there were a bunch of people using this same argument back then. Or how about when women started working? Are the kids unsafe now because Mom wanted to actually do something with her life instead of putting on a plastic smile and tending to the kitchen all day? (No offense to any stay-at-home moms or dads who choose to do so; I know that’s a full-time job in itself, and you have my respect.) What happened when the “marital definition” changed to allow divorce and remarrying? Should we pass some constitutional amendments preventing those? C’mon, don’t stop with the gays; go oppress a bunch of other people too!
AND THEN, to make it even more betterer (grammars!), you return to the mind-projection fallacy by claiming, “Currently, as a society, we have wavered from this traditional motivation, and many, not all, view marriage as a venue for self-fulfillment.” It’s so nice of you, Mr. Balling, to define my and countless others’ marriages as a “venue for self-fulfillment.” Oddly, though, I don’t remember you ever hanging out with my family and me, or with our neighbors, so I don’t see how you could provide any sort of factual information to back up your claim. (And if you say that I need to provide evidence so you can disprove it, that’s called onus probandi, in case you were interested.) The only fact that I’ve been able to glean from your entire ill-constructed argument is that you don’t know how to construct an argument. You know, with facts and stuff. (The basis of your argument is what’s called an appeal to emotion—more specifically, it’s an appeal to fear—if you wanted that for future reference.)
Deep breath. <1 percent, don’t wipe now!>
Frankly, sir, your blatant attempt to sway people by using the “OH MAH GAWD, THINK OF THE CHILDREN” argument is tiresome, bothersome, and insulting, and anyone who has the slightest interest in doing so can pull aside your curtain of self-satisfied drivel and expose the ugliness underneath. Furthermore, you never made any sort of logical attempt to explain how same-sex marriage affects your marriage in any concrete way, instead offering up vague generalizations with no proof. When it comes to the children, I can assure you that I am thinking of my children, and not just my children but all the children they will come in contact with and all the adults they will someday be, and it is my sincerest wish as a parent that I can raise them to be tolerant, to respect the free will of others, and, above all, to be able to see beneath the smug bigotry and oppression of those who would enslave the world to satisfy their own ugly lust for control. If you have any children, it is my hope that they enjoy a peaceful life, one free of tyranny.
Aaaaaaaaand fin.