Marriage Equality 2015 - Dissecting the arguments - Part 1: Logic

The Marriage Equality referendum looms large this year and already those on the opposing side are beginning to trot out the same batch of logical fallacies and worn-out cliched arguments to justify denying people equal treatment under the law. As a result I've decided to distill some of the posts I've made on Boards over the years into a summary of the main arguments against marriage equality and why they don't stand up to even the shallowest scrutiny. I've divided this into several parts so anyone reading this doesn't get bogged down in a tidal wave of information. This part deals with the stock arguments being put forward against marriage equality and their logical flaws. The upcoming parts will deal with why the bible doesn't support the anti-equality side in the way they think it does; the arguments about children and marriage and the research which supports same-sex parenting and finally, a dissection of the research used by the anti-equality side to argue against same-sex parenting.

The first thing that should be pointed out is that the stock arguments now being put forward by anti-equality campaigners are not new. Take these for example:

1. The religious argument

"Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

OK, let's start off with an easy one. This argument, despite what you might think is still quite popular in this referendum. Take this for example:

A Yes vote in the referendum will undermine the principle of equality

It should be obvious to everyone that this argument is a non-starter. Quite apart from the fact that the bible doesn't support the NO position (Something which I'll cover in more depth in a future post), but the constitution, the thing that these people are ostensibly trying to protect forbids adopting such a position:

44.2.2 The State guarantees not to endow any religion.

44.3 The State shall not impose any disabilities or make any discrimination on the ground of religious profession, belief or status.

Finally, I'll let the great orator of modern times Barack Obama explain why this argument fails:

2. The unnatural argument

"The amalgamation of the races is not only unnatural, but is always productive of deplorable results. The purity of the public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of civilization . . . all require that [the races] should be kept distinctly separate, and that connections and alliances so unnatural should be prohibited by positive law and subject to no evasion."

Again, this argument pops up quite a lot, usually voiced in the USA as the "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" argument. However, you do find the argument here too, like this from a month ago:

Head to head: Why we should vote against the same-sex marriage referendum

In this article Bruce Arnold argues:

"All living organisms on the surface of the world, and beneath and above that surface, are motivated by simple and basic instincts, the two most important of which are survival and procreation. These cannot easily be separated. From the tiniest embodiment of life on this planet to the large and complicated nature of animals and birds, and of men and women, survival goes hand-in-hand with the desire, need or instinct to procreate. All life depends on this primal expression of life’s purpose. A great part of the actual meaning of my life, and the marriage that is an embodiment of what I am and have been for the greater part of this past century, is vested in this simple but unique truth."

Apart from all the other things that Arnold gets wrong in his article, this is one of the most glaring problems. Firstly, marriage, being a social construct, is by definition unnatural. Secondly, even our instinct for monogamy is questionable. Human sexual behaviour is essentially a compromise between the unrestrained desires of the male for as many mates as possible and the unrestrained desires of the female for a perfect single mate who is reliable and genetically superior. As a consequence, when we look at societies historically and geographically, what we see is this:

The above graph taken from this article shows that just 19% of human societies. The author goes on to state, however that within polygynous societies that monogamy is quite common. As much as this is generally true, it is quite badly worded. As other authors such as Matt Ridley have shown, it was quite common within polygynous societies for a male to have a favourite or preferred wife who would have had a degree of higher status afforded to her, but this is quite different from a monogamous relationship as we understand it today.

The big problem here though is that arguing against something on the basis of whether or not it is natural is just straight up wrong. This argument is what is termed an appeal to nature and is explained here.

3. The "breakdown of society" argument

"Civilized society has the power of self-preservation, and, marriage being the foundation of such society, most of the states in which the Negro forms an element of any note have enacted laws inhibiting intermarriage between the white and black races."

Again we have another argument which is pretty straightforwardly wrong. And here's Pope Francis spouting it in January:

Pope Francis: Gay marriage will 'destroy the family,' 'disfigure God's plan'

This is an example of another logical fallacy, the appeal to consequences of a belief. Really, this is just a more refined scaremongering tactic. Rather than tackle the issue of marriage equality on its own merits, proponents of this argument try to scare the audience by associating it with negative consequences.

4. The "slippery slope" argument

"[If interracial couples have a right to marry], all our marriage acts forbidding intermarriage between persons within certain degrees of consanguinity are void."

Ah, the slippery slope argument. This argument is simultaneously the most common and heinous argument in the current debate. Here is Breda O'Brien giving voice to it:

‘Should we allow mothers to marry their daughters?’

Apart from being side-splittingly laughable it is also a fallacious argument, namely the slippery slope fallacy. At no point does Breda or anyone else on the NO side demonstrate a series of sound logical reasons why the acceptance of marriage equality MUST lead to the removal of all marriage laws.

5. The "what about the children" argument

"It is contended that interracial marriage has adverse effects not only upon the parties thereto but upon their progeny . . . and that the progeny of a marriage between a Negro and a Caucasian suffer not only the stigma of such inferiority but the fear of rejection by members of both races."

At the time of writing this, the Children and Family Relationships Bill is about to render this argument entirely moot (Well, let's hope so). However, for the longest time, the issue of gay parenting has been inextricably and incorrectly linked with marriage equality. I will deal with the gay parenting aspect of this particular argument in a future post but for now it suffices to show that this too, in the words of Douglas Adams, is a load of dingo's kidneys.

This like the immediately previous one, is an attempt at scaremongering, specifically an appeal to fear.

Despite the argument being fundamentally flawed, it is nonetheless powerful, which is why it gets used a lot, even for comic effect:

6. The "traditional marriage" argument

"Allowing interracial marriages “necessarily involves the degradation” of conventional marriage, an institution that “deserves admiration rather than execration."

Again, quite a common argument, so common in fact that we've already seen it above in the article on Pope Francis. The "traditional marriage" argument as point no. 3 above demonstrates is doubly wrong. Not only because of the scaremongering surrounding negative consequences but also because it is an appeal to tradition. The argument fails not only because it makes an automatic assumption that the way things were done was better but also because it assumes that there aren't more important considerations. Except that there are and this is the heart of the debate. Equality matters. Equality is a principle enshrined in our constitution and others worldwide:

40.1 All citizens shall, as human persons, be held equal before the law.


NOTE: All of the quotes in red above come from the two landmark anti-miscegenation court cases, Loving v. Virginia and Perez v. Sharp. It never ceases to amaze me how the same arguments are cropping up now 50 years after they were shown to be wrong.

Addendum: Since I originally started debating against the stock arguments against marriage equality, a new argument seems to have evolved so I thought that I would deal with it briefly. This argument is what I am calling the linguistic argument. It goes like this: "Legalising gay marriage would be bad because it would mean redefining marriage." It has puzzled me for quite a while that anyone would think this was a good argument. For a start, nobody proposing this argument has explained why redefining marriage would be a bad thing only stating that it would. They seem to think that we would suddenly lose all means to communicate because we wouldn't know what marriage meant. 
Having studied the argument though, it ends up simply being a prescriptivist argument. Here is Tom Scott explaining why these arguments don't hold up:

That's about it for the logic of the arguments on the NO side of the debate. In the next part I will detail why the Bible doesn't support the NO side in the way most people think it does.