Lies, Damn Lies

Gay Marriage

This clip is a great little Daily Show Snippet on gay marriage. I'm actually not going to focus on the content that much, rather on the homophobic campaigner's pointing out that some gay campaigners are coming off like the Nazi's.

This is not a rare argument, unfortunately, in fact Godwin's law specifically deals with this, saying "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one". The problem with this comparison, is, even though it may even be accurate, it is meaningless.

The Nazis where, in most cases, pretty bad pieces of work, who commited many disgusting acts along the way to power. However, just because the Nazis did it does not make it wrong. An act that is disgusting or heinous will in of itself be like that, regardless of whether the Nazis did it or not. While a comparison to the Nazis can make us draw breath, it does not necessarily mean that we are in the wrong.

Hitler, for example, was a great orator- skilled at working the masses into a frenzy of support. Does that make all great orators bad? On a lower level, Nazis walked and talked, breathed, ate, drank, made love. None of these things are in any way inherently bad, although they were done by bad people.

This is a rather huge logical fallacy, and it actually does link into a gay marriage argument used in the US that legalising gay marriage will "force" people to legalise polygamy. So? If you do not have a reason to dislike gay marriage other than seeing it as equivalent to something you DO dislike, perhaps you need to examine your dislike of the other thing. The point here is that if you consider those things equal, then you should be able to say the thing you dislike about polygamy in respect to gay marriage- if you cannot, they are not equivalent, and your analogy fails.


EDIT-Update. Wikipedia has an article on this very topic.

I'm not entirely sure what is wrong with polygamy, other than legalising it without legalisng polyandry would be clearly wrong, but that is of course, another issue- it's not something I need to argue about, if you apply logic carefully enough. Unfortunately logic is something that's lacking from a LOT of debates, usually because people are unable to come out and say what they MEAN, so they have to argue from perhaps a slightly disgenous position, leading to them making these flagrant logical fallacies along the way.

posted by Mr K @ 7:56 pm