Some amusing arguments against gay marriage…
If you have a cognitively-challenged underclass, as every large nation has, you need some anchoring institutions for them to aspire to; and those institutions should have some continuity and stability. Heterosexual marriage is a key such institution. In a society in which nobody had an IQ below 120, homosexual marriage might be plausible. In the actual societies we have, other considerations kick in.
It is difficult to decide where to begin in pulling this apart.
To accept the basic oh-so-flawless premises here, though, wouldn’t it be simpler to explain the simple idea of marriage (1) to the “cognitively-challenged” (ah, the conservative exploits political correctness to avoid letting his audience know he means them!) - rather than the idea of sex-restricted marriage (2)? Count the words in my explanations of them:
Surely the first one, where gender is irrelevant, is a lot simpler to explain to the “cognitively-challenged”?
The actual argument here appears to boil down to this, though:
Don’t we elect smart people to ensure that democracy does not mean idiocracy? It is frightening to imagine this lack of logic passing for argument.
Moving on:
Human nature exists, and has fixed characteristics.
Source? Just gonna go ahead and give this sentence the “anti-diversity” seal of approval.
We are not infinitely malleable.
*cough* How did we evolve?
Human society and human institutions need to ”fit” human nature, or at least not go too brazenly against the grain of it.
If there is a human nature (some kind of average of the way that people do things across the board), then human institutions are an extension of it, an aspect of the cultural components to our evolution. That something is “natural” - say, rape, murder: presumably components of human nature as they pop up again and again - must mean that our institutions need to “fit” that something. This is precisely why no nation on earth has ever criminalised murder.
Homophobia seems to be a rooted condition in us.
Yes. Not innately, though. But because when we grow up we see heterosexuals prized over homosexuals - in the same way that we see colonists prized over indigenous peoples, Europeans prized over Africans, the rich prized over the poor, men prized over women, the abled prized over the disabled - we develop an instituationalised homophobia. Again, natural != moral, Thomas Aquinas.
It has been present always and everywhere, if only minimally (and unfairly — there has always been a double standard here) in disdain for “the man who plays the part of a woman.”
Okay, so it’s unfair. Thank you. Notice misogyny here, not to mention the ignorance of lesbianism. Oh, and the prizing of homosexuality in, say, settings in Ancient Greece, the pre-Colombian Americas, the Pacific Islands, Japan pre-Europeanisation …
There has never, anywhere, at any level of civilization, been a society that approved egalitarian (i.e. same age, same status) homosexual bonding.
WHERE HAS THERE BEEN A SOCIETY THAT APPROVED EGALITARIAN HETEROSEXUAL BONDING? Marriage in the Western tradition is a contractual thing, an extension of property rights. Nothing egalitarian about that.
This tells us something about human nature — something it might be wisest (and would certainly be conservative-est) to leave alone.
Great. Be a conservative. Ignore the facts and ignore the chance to improve your world. Why even get out of bed?
