I have read quite a few editorials in the last few days which have lumped homosexuality together with all kinds of immoral, unethical, and illegal practices. By including homosexuality in the same sentance with these societal ills, the writers hope to appeal to some very loose argument by analogy and of guilt by association:
Murder is illegal. Homosexual marriage isn’t legal. Therefore, if we legalize homosexual marriage, we may as well legalize murder.
Is there really no difference between why murder is illegal and why homosexual marriage isn’t legal? Or even why murder is considered immoral and why homosexuality is considered immoral?
The difference here–and it isn’t a subtle one–is in order to show that murder and rape are immoral, I don’t have to devolve into ridiculous slippery-slope arguments from analogy. I can actually prove deductively why murder and rape are objectively immoral. Can those who call homosexuality immoral do the same? No. So they resort to these appeals to emotion and dogma.
We can debate ad nauseum whether or not this nation was founded on Christian principles. Certainly, there is some correlation between Christian principles and morality (one, by my reckoning, which falls far short of 100%). However, when our founding fathers composed our very secular constitution, a document beginning in “We the people…”, they formed a government whos laws could not be supported solely by religious dogma.
Unfortunately, all of this reason and rational about homosexuality probably can never persuade those who believe it is immoral for solely dogmatic reasons. As Jonathan Swift said: “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.” Still, this is a University campus, one in which reason and rational are very highly regarded. So please, no more letters to the chrony with these very flawed arguments about homosexuality’s supposed immorality. If anyone would like to make this claim in the future, please, give us some actual, logically valid reasoning, and not incoherent, logically fallacious ramblings.