I feel the need to address a couple of stupid irrational ideas that keep popping up when it comes to debates about gay marriage and gay rights. I use “gay” and “homosexual” as simplified terms for anyone with preferences outside plain heterosexuality, including bisexuals, transgenders, and so on.
First the idea gay rights depends on sexual preference being a determined trait and not a choice. “It’s not a choice” is sometimes used as a blanket defense against homosexuality being a sin, or being immoral. If you suggest that sexual preference might be a choice, or that the evidence isn’t compelling either way, you are often opposed by people that assume you are going to argue that since it might be a choice, we should try to decrease the number of homosexuals, or are told to not promote that line of thinking to give religious fundamentalists more fuel for their arguments. But this is dishonest thinking. Whether sexual preference is a choice or not doesn’t affect what rights homosexuals should have. So what if it is a choice? Homosexuality harms no one. It is not something to be fought or eliminated. I would rather Christian and Muslim fundamentalists thought I were doing wrong, and engaged me in rational debate to try to convince me, rather than think me ill or damaged, to be fixed, rather than reasoned with. Gay rights stands on its own merits, and homosexuality does not need excuses.
Next the slippery slope argument. And this goes both ways. There’s a lot of people saying that if we allow gay marriage, we must allow polygamy, and acts of bestiality, incest, pedophilia, and so on. That many of the arguments for gay rights are at their core arguments for sexual freedom of many kinds. On that last, they are right! But that in and of itself is not an argument against gay rights. If an argument seems to apply to both gay marriage and polygamy, that does not mean that all the arguments that might exist against polygamy are applicable to gay marriage. If you think polygamy is wrong and should be fought against, and someone makes an argument for gay marriage that might also apply to polygamy, you should not fight the argument on that basis, but find your arguments against polygamy, and see if they are applicable to gay marriage as well! But more importantly, gay rights proponents should not shy away from other sexual freedoms merely because they don’t want public opinion against themselves. Rational debate must come first, and using dishonest and irrational argumentation only hurts the cause in the long run. If someone says “if we allow gay marriage, why not pedophilia as well?” a good answer is “because children can’t consent, while homosexuals can”, not vague or misleading arguments like “there is no slippery slope” “those are two different things” or emotive arguments like “are you comparing me do a pedophile?!” At the same time we have to be open to the idea that if society is (or have been) wrong about homosexuality, it might be wrong about incest, or polygamy, as well. Each step has to be argued on its own, without conflating the various liberties into one.
And last one that is unique to gay rights opponents. Parenting, and a child’s rights. There’s a lot of arguments these days that a child needs both a mother and a father, and that just two parents of the same gender isn’t enough. Or that we don’t know enough about how same-gendered parents affect children, so we shouldn’t experiment. There are several problems with this kind of thinking. The first is that all these arguments apply equally to either single parents, be it divorced parents, an unknown father, or even a widow or widower; economically poor parents; or foster or adopting parents. There is no argument for allowing these kind of parents that does not equally argue for allowing same-sexed parents. The other is that all parenting is a gamble. There is never any guarantee that parents will raise their kid well. I bet every single parent feel the fear that they won’t be doing right by child, and an uncertainty of how their child will turn out despite their efforts. There is no deterministic “good parent” button, and especially not one that heterosexual couples have exclusive access to. Every single child raised is an experiment.