Gay Marriage

I’m going to assume that the post for round one was his opening arguments, so I will respond. I can discern four separate points that my opponent is making. I numbered and bolded out his points. Next to my rebuttals, I put an underlined word referring to the main mistake that my opponent is making. NEGATIVE ARGUMENTS 1- Religion is not supposed to be in politics. irrelevance: True, but that does not mean that gay marriage should be legal. You do not need religion to oppose gay marriage. My positive arguments make that clear. 2- If you don’t like it, don’t get one. irrelevance: I assume my opponent means that if you do not like gay marriage, then do not enter into a gay marriage. Good advice, but how is this an argument for why gay marriage should be legal? It isn’t. 3- Love is love. rhetoric: True, but there are different categories of love, and one kind of love is not identical to another kind of love. Plato might have been the first prominent philosopher to distinguish between different kinds of love (this is why we have the term “platonic love”). C. S. Lewis was another, and recently Harry Frankfurt has taken up the issue. The most common distinction is between sexual love and non-sexual love. A man’s love for his mother should be non-sexual, while his love for his wife should be sexual. A man is allowed to love his mother, but most people would consider something to be wrong with theman if he had sexual love for his mother. We can clearly see that the word “love” does not just refer to a single unambiguous thing. It can be used in many ways. Simply saying that love is love and you shouldn’t stop people from loving each other is miles away from giving support to homosexual relationships. Being opposed to gay marriage does not commit one to being opposed to love between two people of the same sex; it only means being opposed to sexual love between two people of the same sex. An argument for gay marriage based on the value of love needs to go beyond my opponent’s three-wordtautology and explain why there is no significant difference between sexual love and platonic love, or that a respect for platonic love between two people of the same sex should poor over to respect for sexual love between two people of the same sex. 4- Most heterosexual couples get a divorce in the first five years. irrelevance: My opponent should have provided evidence for this since it is an empirical claim, but I’ll take his word on it. But even being true, this also is not an argument for gay marriage. Failure in heterosexual marriage does not entail either the success of appropriateness or homosexual marriage. It rather means that people sometimes get married too hastily, or to people whom they do not really love,or they get married for money, or status, or whatever. The point is that the failure of heterosexual marriages is indicative of the fact that humans marry for the wrong reasons or that they are chronically bad at predicting what will make them happy in the future, not that homosexual marriage is a good thing. POSITIVE ARGUMENTS [1] reductio ad absurdum: A logical argument form called reductio ad absurdum points out how a belief leads to absurdities, then the belief should be rejected. If we change the definition of marriage to appease gay people, then we have to be fair and change it for all other groups. We have to allow people who engage in bestiality to marry animals. We have to allow incestuous family members to marry each other. We have to allow pedophiliac adults to marry children. We would also have to allow people to marry inanimate objects (not that it would happen, but the principle remains). But allowing these is absurd, so we should not allow gay marriage either. If gay marriage supporters believe that the law should be changed for people who want to enter into gay marriages but not changed for people who want to marry their pets, their spouses, children, or objects, they have to explain why. Until then, support for gay marriage remains absurd. [2] inequality: The reason why gay relationships should not be given equal marital rights as heterosexual relationships is because gay relationships are not equal to heterosexual relationships. This country was founded on the principle that we are all born equal (that as citizens we are all equal, no one is superhuman or sub-human) , not that we should always treat people equally regardless of the circumstances. Do we give the same punishment to someone who stole something as we do to someone who is a mass murderer? Of course not. We give proportional treatment, not equal treatment. There are several facts that reveal to us the conclusion that homosexuality is not simply an equal alternative to heterosexuality and therefore should not be treated with equal rights. (a) biology: Heterosexual relationships can produce offspring while homosexual ones cannot. Procreation is essential for the survival of the human race. If you gave gay people their own country (a country in which only gay people lived and had only homosexual relationships), in a century it would beempty because there would be no way to reproduce. Homosexual relationships depend on heterosexual relationships for their very existence. Now of course there are cases in which people cannot conceive. But this does not refute my argument. It does not mean that these people are immoral. It is recognized as a biological mistake that they cannot conceive. Their bodies normally would conceive if an error had not occurred, but a homosexual biological union was never meant to procreate. Procreation is not the only purpose of sex, but it is one of the purposes in healthy sexual union. Why should homosexual unions be legitimized if they cannot even meet one of the key purposes of sexual union? Biology is on the side of gay marriage opponents. (b) sexual anatomy: Even aside from biology, there is anatomical inequality. Penises and vaginas fit together like hands and gloves, or keys and locks. They compliment each other. There is balance. You can’t fit a penis into a penis or a vagina into a vagina, and anal intercourse is unsanitary and unhealthy. Why should we legitimize an imbalanced a and non-complimentary union? (c) holistic anatomy: Men and women’s bodies as wholes also compliment each other. Men’s bodies are larger, more muscular and rugged than women’s, which are softer, smaller, and more supple. Again, there is balance and symmetry in heterosexual unions, but this is missing from homosexual unions. Apply the same logic to the minds/spirits of men and women. If you take a marriage and subtract from it procreation, sex, proper sexual anatomical union, proper holistic anatomical union, and proper spiritual union, then what do you have? A friendship, maybe a really good loving, caring friendship, but not a marriage. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. Why can’t gay people be content with having loving and caring friendships? Why do they want marriage to include both balanced and imbalanced unions? This points towards the conculsion that the motivation behind gay marriage is politically based, not morally or legally based. They can enjoy their lives as homosexuals without infringing on marriage, but they want to change marriage's definition. It all looks political in the light of all I've just said. CONCLUSION My opponent has offered no argument for why gay marriage should be legal, but I have given several arguments for why it should not be legal. It leads to absurdities and it requires that we treat unequals as equals. I await his reply. sources in comments