I said here http://bernielatham.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/gingrich-hes-americas-moral-compass/ that the right will continue to push the gay marriage issue. This has been a fundamental Republican electoral pattern from Nixon’s racist ’southern strategy’ on up through Karl Rove. This issue keeps the evangelical base motivated and might draw some white and Hispanic Catholics and religous african americans. Not to mention the “Deliverance” demographic.
The problem with this strategy is that it is intolerant of difference. It is bigoted. Where voters perceive that bigotry is precisely what is going on, they eventually turn away in distaste. In that post above, I used the earlier example of the racism which led to laws against interracial marriage. It’s a clear parallel but this parallel has to be denied by the conservative movement for the anti-gay marriage strategy to have any viability.
Which brings us to Dennis Prager’s column at Townhall, titled “Is Gay The New Black?” We can guess what his answer will be. Let’s look at how he attempts to deny the parallel.
The likening of the movement for same-sex marriage to the black civil rights struggle is a primary argument of pro same-sex marriage groups. This comparison is a major part of the moral appeal of redefining marriage: Just as there were those who once believed that blacks and whites should not be allowed to be married, the argument goes, there are today equally bigoted individuals who believe that men should not be allowed to marry men and women should not be allowed to marry women.
Note here how he slips in that “redefining marriage” as if redefining is somehow inappropriate. Of course, during the period when laws against miscegenation were on the books of numerous states, “marriage” meant only whites with white and blacks with blacks. Interracial marriages were not “marriages” and only legalization made them so. (Not to mention the early history of the US where people commonly ‘married’ and raised families without the sanctification of a priest/pastor because few were around).
But here’s the common rhetorical move these folks make to deny the parallel.
One has to either be ignorant of segregation laws and the routine humiliations experienced by blacks during the era of Jim Crow, or one has to be callous to black suffering, to equate that to a person not being allowed to marry a person of the same sex. They are not in the same moral universe.
There is in fact no comparison between the situation of gays in America in 2008 and the situation of most black Americans prior to the civil rights era. Gays are fully accepted, and as a group happen to constitute one of the wealthiest in American life. Moreover, not being allowed to marry a person of the same sex is not anti-gay; it is pro-marriage as every civilization has defined it. The fact is that states like California already grant people who wish to live and love a member of the same sex virtually every right that marriage bestows except the word married. http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2008/11/18/is_gay_the_new_black
If we break down this argument, here’s what we get. Blacks were oppressed more severely than gay people. This greater oppression and suffering is a greater moral injustice. This difference in magnitude of moral injustice therefore negates any claim of a parallel. To put it another way, hitting your wife with an open hand rather than an axe means she really has no grounds for complaint.
This is, in logical terms, a straw man fallacy…where the opponent’s argument is misrepresented and that misrepresentation is argued against rather than the actual argument (thus straw man). No one who supports gay marriage argues that gays have suffered at the magnitude of blacks in America, of course. The parallel lies in both groups being excluded from equal membership and rights within society.
