The Tautology That Broke the Camel’s Legs
By St. Maggie of the Non-Sequitur:
Imagine you stand in the middle of vast, hostile desert. A camel is your only means of transversing it, your lifeline to the future. The camel is burdened– stumbling, loaded down, tired; enfeebled– the conditions of the modern life are clearly not favorable to it. But still it’s your only hope, because to get across that desert you need a camel.
Now, chop off its legs and order it to carry you to safety.
That’s what SSM looks like, to me.
Like, whoa, man. I didn’t know cultural conservatives had become OK with dropping acid before blogging, but I suppose this may portend some flagging in the drug war.
The thing, though, is that this ridiculous analogy really isn’t any worse than any of her other “arguments”. SSM just feels wrong to her; there’s ultimately nothing else going on here. The core of her non-arguments is feeble claims that since we’ve generally excluded same-sex couples from marriage we have to keep doing it (“History is on my side,” “This would be a major social change”), which have the obvious problem that they’re equally applicable to segregation, female disenfranchisement, and any other historical injustice you can name–in a liberal democratic society, traditions should not be self-justifying. Perhaps recognizing this, she argues that there is a rational reason: marriage is defined by procreation. But this justification fails because 1)it’s false (marriage has many other functions, we don’t exclude heterosexuals who can’t or won’t procreate from marriage), and 2)it wouldn’t logically exclude same-sex marriages even if it was true. So rather than defending this ostensible justification, it’s back to crazy metaphors about camels. And this is what all comes down to: irrational prejudice, a feeling that it would just be icky to let people whose sexual practices some people don’t like to get married. This argument is nothing but a crude tautology, and it’s never getting any better. Maybe I’ve been too hard on Volokh; if he was using Gallagher as a double agent to prove that arguments against SSM are remarkably bad, her guest-posting stint was certainly a success.
Julian Sanchez explains in more detail.