Ages of Experience Have Taught Us
Next up. Bush’s bizarro non sequitur.
Mr Bush said: “Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.”
Okay – and? So what? What’s your point? What follows from that? How, exactly, do you get from that to a need to forbid gay marriage? What’s the deal? Are you thinking that the existence of gay marriages will exert some kind of sucking effect on straight marriages, causing them gradually but surely to – um – become something other than straight marriages? To turn into poker dens, or iron smelters, or Manolo Blahnik shoes? But how? How would gay marriages do that? What exactly is the mechanism you think is operating here?
I know, I know; silly question. Silly because it doesn’t matter; silly because irrelevant. The people who pay attention to that kind of drivel won’t notice or think about the non sequitur, and Bush and his caretakers know that, so of course it’s irrelevant. But what the hell. I wanted to point it out anway.
you say that “The people who pay attention to that kind of drivel won’t notice or think about the non sequitur.”
but then how about this:
http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2006/05/hermaphrodite_h.html#comments
Thanks – that’s an interesting discussion.
However (she added) – it’s not relevant to my point as far as I can tell. What I’m calling drivel is Bush’s non sequitur of ‘heterosexual marriage good therefore gay marriage should be banned’. David Thingy isn’t talking about that, he’s talking about something quite different.
Mr Bush said: “Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society.”
OB, you can certainly ask “So what?”
Before that, however, I would say: “Prove it!”
Mr Bush offers exactly the same evidence as all others proffering this opinion: None at all. It is taken as self-evident.
OB, I know it’s not the same issue.
However, David “Thingy” is supposed to be a guy who thinks critically about things – yet some of his arguments (those that appear later in his replies to comments, not in the original entry) for his position involve a similar non sequitur: happy families have virtually always involved a mommy and a daddy, therefore a family without one will be unhappy.
Oh, I see, Tea – right. I misunderstood your point.
Keith, sure. But it was the grossness of the non seq that I wanted to poke at.
You could just rephrase Bush thus to get what he is really saying: “I would like to ban something which is not the same as something I assert is good.”
Unassailable…
Totally.
Or, I love cherry pie, therefore I want to ban peach pie.
Equally unassailable.