Down the slippery slope
Jeff Jacoby is a conservative columnist in the Boston Globe. His response today (link will break tomorrow) to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling permitting gay marriage is to warn us — Sanctorumly — that we’ve started down a slippery slope towards polygamy and incest. After all, he writes, one of the dissenting judges said that state’s equal rights amendment was cited in the Court’s decision, and the Boston Globe in 1976 had dismissed the claim that “the amendment would…legitimize marriage between people of the same sex.” Yet, 27 years later, that’s exactly what’s happened. Likewise, in 1989, the Globe editorialized that the gay rights law does not “put Massachusetts on a ‘slippery slope’ towards” a right to gay marriage.
Cool research. But I seem not to be following Jacoby’s logic here. The ERA of the Massachusetts Constitution started us down a slippery slope that has led to gay marriage. This is evidence that the gay marriage ruling will lead us down a slippery slope to polygamy and incest. Thus the gay marriage ruling is bad. That’s his reasoning, right?
But doesn’t that logic also mean that the ERA was bad? Does Jacoby really want to maintain that guaranteeing equal rights for women was a bad thing for the state? “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.” Yeah, there’s a slope we should be afraid to get on. Who knows where it could lead?
And there’s an argument just as good as Jacoby’s that says that the 15th Amendment started us down the slippery slope to the ERA. Damn Abolitionists!
You know, there’s a reason why the slippery slope argument is classified as a fallacy. Jacoby’s just illustrated it.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I quite agree. “The slippery slope” is always a lousy metaphor for decisions that humans make. We are not the passive victims of the remorseless laws of physics. We make choices – consciously or unconsciously – and we’re allowed to change our minds. People who talk about the slippery slope would be more honest if they took their labelling off the slope and spoke the truth – which would probably be that they are feeling frightened. That I could attempt to feel some compassion for.
Down the slippery slope
In the Globe, Jeff Jacoby argues that you legalize gay marriage, next thing you know the polygamists want approval. Can the man/dog contingent be far behind? David says logic like…
Ode To The Innocent Unknown With Marble Top
Stone dead and unknown, who’s life values less than the tomb. Why do we forget so easily what is most obvious to all: violent death is terrible! Violent death is never noble, heroic, nor romantic: it is terrible–the soul outright ripped from one’s body; the breath of the strong suddenly desperately exhausted.
Violent death is not a statistic: it is absolute and without ratio. The dead, the dying, are tallied for us daily, like coins in a bank account register, as if someday the total might suffice to support us, or prove insufficient to keep us from debtor’s prison, or sanctify and justify us as survivors, exonerating us from whatever evil we had to join in with.
Violent death, the sudden totality of one’s hope torn blind–the lightening realization of eternity, and nothing else–with blood, and pain, and unfathomable loss, inexorably advances across all we take for certain, and our purposes prove infinitesimal, as ephemeral as those shallow souls who we fear to blame.
Violent death is terrible! Violent death is not a gift. Violent death is never a number. Violent death is never what we wish it to be.
David,
I took heroin in high school. Today I’m addicted to chewing gum. Some fallacies are true.
Can you fix me up?
slippery slope arguments
Andrew Sullivan, a conservative, argues that “If it’s not a crime to be gay, why can’t we get married?” If two lesbian women want to share financial responsibility for each other for life, why is it a conservative notion to…
A slippery slope fallacy isn’t necessarily always a fallacy when in fact event A DOES cause event B to occur. In the case of gay rights, we’ve already had two documented law suits filed by polygamists in the past year. Just because there is a slippery slope argument doesn’t automatically invalidate the argument.
The gun control slippery slope is just the opposite. There is no direct or casual relationship between handgun laws and handgun confiscation. But, opening up marriage to gays does, and in fact HAS lead to lawsuits by polygamists.
And now we’re back to deciding the issue under both gay AND polygamists. Just because one is more prevalant than another is not a valid argument when the constitution protects individual rights.
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