Gay Marriage and Slippery Slopes Again:

This time it’s from professional blowhard—Catholic League President Bill Donohue:

“But neither offers a principled reason why – if two men can marry – we can't allow Fred to marry Fido. Nor can they make a principled argument against allowing Tom, Dick and Harry to marry. After all, if it's discriminatory not to allow Tom to marry Dick, why isn't it a matter of discrimination to stop Tom and Dick from adding Harry to their marriage? Why should poor Harry be excluded?”

"If love is the sole basis for marriage, then what gives society the right to deny a marriage license to Fred and Fido? Or, for that matter, to Sam and Sally, a brother-sister couple who – like in the movie 'The Dreamers' – love each other in a way most people find unnatural? Surely it is irrational to forbid incest! After all, we once made it illegal for whites to marry blacks, didn't we? So isn't it the same to deny Fred and Fido; Tom, Dick and Harry; and Sam and Sally? Wouldn't it be intolerant to say no to this happy trio of lovers? Isn't this what makes America great – equal rights for those who commit bestiality, polygamy, sodomy and incest?"

Like I’ve said before, this argument begs the question as to why bestiality, polygamy, and incest logically follow from homosexuality any more than they logically follow from interracial couplings. Whenever the analogy between homosexual & interracial couplings is made, anti-gay advocates state that we are talking about two different things, apples & oranges. Yes, we can distinguish between homosexual and interracial relationships. But so can we equally distinguish between homosexual couplings and polygamous, bestial, and incestuous ones. And the only thing that logically connects P.I.B. with homosexuality—being frowned on by tradition—also connects them with interracial couplings. (I learned this argument from John Corvino.)

Just think about Donahue’s comments regarding brother & sister love. Yes many people find incest, like homosexuality to be “unnatural” (whatever that means). But people equally thought interracial couplings to be “unnatural.” Unnatural from a religions perspective: “If God wanted the races to intermingle, He wouldn’t have created them separately”; unnatural from an evolutionary perspective: “The races evolved separately”; and unnatural from a social perspective: “If we observe behavior, it seems only ‘natural’ that folks prefer to couple with their own kind, their own race.” One can argue that interracial couplings fit the male/female marriage paradigm in a way that same sex couplings to not. But so do heterosexual incest couples. They don’t deny the one-man/one-woman order. And in fact, if one believes in the Biblical story of creation, the whole human race was propagated by brother/sister incest.

My point here is ONLY to show that whenever we extend rights, we can always make slippery slope arguments, asking, “who next do we extend rights to?” and “where do we draw the line.” And those same arguments were equally applicable when we extended the right to marry to interracial couples.

The proper way to defend interracial couplings from the slippery slope argument is point out that we can limit the decision's effect by making distinctions between it and anything else that might come later. And we can do the same thing while defending gay marriage from the slippery slope charge.