Viva victory!
Sharon, the legal czar over at our trusted friend Dana Pico’s group blog, ever ironically named Common Sense Political Thought, finally throws in the towel on our epic gay marriage debate.
Of course, she declares victory before scampering away. Yet I think on the merits of each reason she claimed gays don’t have a right to equal recognition of their marriages, I circumvented and surpassed her talking points. Sharon whined about my rough language, but freely and frequently dished it out herself. I waded through the muck and dealt with the logic just fine. And I feel just fine, despite being called all manner of names and having my faculties attacked at every juncture. Why? Because I know the difference between reason and rhetoric. I don’t really care what I get called (full disclosure: actually, it always stings, for about 2.5 seconds…), what concerns me is the thought that my reasoning might be in error, invalid, incomplete, or lacking elegance. Typically I feel I lack elegance, and that I’m missing something which will drive my points home into the heart of my opponent, but I take care that my premises are factual and that my conclusions validly follow from them. If not, it’s time to rethink my position, isn’t it?
I will admit, Sharon did make me dust off a few cobwebs and actually go look some things up. It’s been years since I bothered going twelve rounds with one of her kind, and she was one of the more sophisticated among them, heavy on legal precedent, careful to avoid too many explicit negative comments about homosexuality or any but the most vague references to religion. But in the end she was left tangled in her own rhetoric, mocking my strange practice of consulting the dictionary to define words, ignoring the precedent for my Constitutional philosophy, and refusing to answer a question as fundamental to the question of treating gays equally as “Is homosexuality a choice?” A red herring, said she. The very crux of it all, said I.
But, like Chomsky always says, don’t take my word for it. Check it out, tell me what you think. Did I refuse to answer any questions? Did I refuse to explain any position I took? Did I avoid Sharon’s actual arguments in favor of straw men I felt easier to take down? Did I misuse any logical fallacies, or rely on any for an argument (I said RELY, I’ll gleefully sprinkle some rhetoric on top of my logical foundations)? Did my arguments become stale, unable to flow or expand to accommodate new information given to me? Or was Sharon painted into a corner, left with no option but to repeat herself over and over again and marvel that it didn’t work on me?
The method of argument is a wonderful thing. All the noise dissipates, and it becomes quite mathematical. And opposition to gay marriage is fundamentally irrational. When all the facts are in, it simply doesn’t add up.
Incidentally, Andrew Sullivan’s wedding to his partner Aaron is approaching. His “jitters” are moving and, as always, thought-provoking. I wish him the best. One day this entire nation will honor the Constitution and recognize his humanity, and therefore his equality.
-jb
UPDATE: After shutting down comments, in a thread where I was severely outnumbered by rightwingers, Sharon writes a post titled, “Liberal Bloggers in the Echo Chamber.” Priceless!
Enjoy your echo chamber, Sharon…I’m not sorry to have disrupted it!
August 17th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Yeah, JB, I gotta take the wishy-washing Catholic progressive line here: was that an effective use of your time? I mean, trolling Brian is one thing – how can any normal person not wanna troll a dude who’s always wrong on every point, and then brags about it? it’s as natural as breathing – but all you did was tire her out. She still doesn’t understand the the slippery-slope argument is fallacious, and she won’t understand that, because it’s been an effective fallacy in mobilizing the base. Politicians (nb not “politicians ‘these days’ – ’twas ever thus, it’s the nature of the beast, claiming that things are “worse now” is bogus gettin’-old-and-dusty stuff) & people who place politics before principle will always lean on this particular fallacy & many other basic logical cheats: post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc arguments, undistributed middles, the whole nine.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:04 am
You mean the unemployed Sinatra tribute singer Brian Pickrell? He’s too easy of a target. I mean, just look at the guy:
August 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am
cbmc: oh, if you knew how shamefully I fritter away my time, you wouldn’t ask if I was wasting it here…still, I did manage to read the first four Harry Potter books during the same span. That was something…but it’s summer vacation, and there are so many hours to fill.
I know logic doesn’t work on some folks, of course. But somebody’s got to stand up for it now and then. Such is the peak of my ambitions…
August 17th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
yeah I dunno man. I think the foam-lipped online right got as big as they are because when you feed trolls, they get fatter. The righty blogosphere is, in part, a huge experiment in trolling.
August 21st, 2007 at 6:48 pm
This is to Aphrael, who commented that my “reliance” on the dictionary to illustrate the way I was using a word was “bizarre”:
Dictionaries are indeed not absolute, evolving over time. Case in point, the word “marriage” has evolved to encompass gay couples who commit for life.
However, in a discussion of what constitutes equal and just treatment, as the Constitution mandates, I used the word “fair” in that specific manner, that of an objective and rational judgment. Sharon pounced and continually evoked both by implication and literally the image of a child crying, “It’s not fair!” She then repeatedly called it an appeal to emotion, without bothering to explain exactly what emotion it was I was appealing to.
In the end, Aphrael, you mirrored my exact point in discussing laws that ban sleeping under bridges and “unequal” effects. You could just have easily replaced “unequal” with “unfair.” Thank heavens we don’t teach our children to cry, “That’s unequal treatment!” when they don’t get as much ice cream as their bigger siblings, no? Else you’d have Sharon all over you
I do not rely solely on the dictionary, but the context of my own statements was clearly one of unequal treatment under the law, and the objective differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals which make offering only heterosexual marriage unequal treatment towards gays.
Having a harpy screech at me over and over, “Fairness is an emotional argument!” was about as irrelevant as a comment could possibly be.
August 27th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Well, I held my nose and clicked your link, and skimmed down Sharon’s whine about how she lost and you won, and I see she’s arguing “Marriage is primarily about creating a stable and safe place to have and raise children” which is the best argument of all for legal marriage for both same-sex and mixed-sex couples.
But of course, bringing that up – pointing out that same-sex couples have children too, by four out of the five means* by which mixed-sex couples have children – always ends up getting into a humungous argument that finally amounts to: some children deserve to have married parents, but some children don’t.
1. What you might call the “usual” direct biological method: both partners conceive children together (though 15% of the time, the male partner isn’t the father, even if he thinks he is).
2. Stepchildren from previous marriage/relationship.
3. AID (or other assisted-conception methods).
4. Fostering.
5. Adoption.
Opponents of same-sex marriage who argue it’s “all about the children” are required either to ignore children of same-sex partners or else to argue that couples who have children by methods 2-5 (and the children themselves) don’t deserve marriage.
September 19th, 2007 at 6:51 am
[...] true liberal fashion, lost the argument in this thread then ran home with his tail between his legs and declared victory. Amusing as this incident was, it would be funnier watching him and his ilk turn this court decision [...]
September 19th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
[...] Some things never change. Brown, in true liberal fashion, lost the (gay marriage) argument in this thread then ran home with his tail between his legs and declared victory. [...]