Patterico's Pontifications

9/24/2005

Dafydd ab Hugh Fails to Bust Three Alleged “Myths” About Gay Marriage

Filed under: Civil Liberties — Patterico @ 3:03 pm



I recently linked (and criticized) a column by Dafydd ab Hugh offering a secular defense of the ban on gay marriage. Dafydd today has another post about gay marriage, in which he purports to refute three “myths” that he says popped up in comments to my earlier post. I find Dafydd’s arguments completely 100% unpersuasive.

Let’s take them one at a time.

1) Dafydd labels as “Myth 1” the idea that same-sex marriage is as civilizing as opposite-sex marriage. Dafydd begins with this nonsensical argument:

The most interesting observation about this claim is that it is purely defensive; it begins from the nervous premise that gays need to be civilized! This is an amazing admission from the proponents of same-sex marriage; if the gay lifestyle were fine as it is, then why would it be so urgent to offer them the possibility of solemnizing their relationships by legally marrying?

This makes no sense to me at all. Dafydd previously argued that society benefits when a man marries a woman, because marriage is a civilizing influence. Why is that not a “nervous premise” that heterosexuals need to be civilized, and thus an admission that there is somehow something wrong with the heterosexual lifestyle?

Dafydd next says:

The first point to make is that the burden of proof of this peculiar claim is on the proponents of same-sex marriage, the ones who want to change 200+ years of American tradition, not on the rest of us to justify not changing everything.

Well, that’s a nice rhetorical trick if you can get away with it, but I’m not sure why it is logically necessary that the opponent of a tradition bear the burden of proof as to why the tradition should be abolished. There are plenty of traditions in various societies: binding women’s feet and clitoral removal leap to mind. Maintaining separate facilities for blacks was a tradition in the South for many years. The burden of proof should not be on the opponents of these traditions just because they are (or were) traditions. But I won’t harp on this, because Dafydd says he will assume the burden of proof himself. As we will later see, he really doesn’t assume it; if he did, he would fail to meet it.

Dafydd purports to prove that gay marriage will have no civilizing influence by engaging in simple logical fallacies. He compares studies showing the alleged sexual promiscuity of openly gay men as a whole to other studies showing the alleged promiscuity of married heterosexual men. He then concludes:

There simply is no dispute in the literature: gay men (and even lesbians) are more sexually promiscuous, as a group, than their heterosexual counterparts. So if gay men’s sexual behavior is not moderated by dating and shacking up, then why would giving them the social approval of a marriage license do the trick?

There are so many logical fallacies here that it’s tough to know where to start.

First, we’re talking about gay marriage as a whole, not just gay marriage between gay men. Dafydd’s studies are completely about gay men, so how does he purport to draw any conclusions about lesbians?

Second, Dafydd doesn’t compare gay men in committed monogamous relationships to heterosexual men in committed monogamous relationships. He compares all openly gay men to only married heterosexual men. This distorts the data in two ways. First, as Dafydd himself admits, studies show that openly gay men are more promiscuous than closeted gays — so his data on the promiscuity of openly gay males shows only the promiscuity of the most promiscuous subset of gays. Second, from that subset, Dafydd fails to distinguish between openly gay men in committed relationships and those who are not. The former group is the only relevant group to compare to married men, and I would be willing to bet that the former group is far less sexually promicuous than the latter, but Dafydd treats them as the same.

Dafydd’s data doesn’t answer the question of what effect marriage would have on gays. It doesn’t even answer the question of what effect marriage would have on gay men. It doesn’t even answer the question of whether gay men are more promiscuous than straight men! In short, Dafydd isn’t comparing apples to apples, or even apples to oranges; it’s more like apples to roast beef sandwiches.

Having failed to prove his own case, Dafydd concludes by shifting the burden of proof back to the other side, something he had claimed he wouldn’t do:

There is not a shred of evidence in the voluminous research done on sexuality to indicate that gay men will moderate their behavior if they are allowed to legally marry — instead of merely being religiously married or common-law married. Sorry, but that’s the truth. If proponents disagree, let’s see the studies.

That is not the argument of someone who has assumed the burden of proof; it is the argument of someone who has placed it on the opposition.

As we will see, Dafydd relies on the same data in his purported refutation of all three “myths,” so his failures here poison all of his remaining arguments.

2) Dafydd labels as “Myth #2” the idea that sexual preference is fixed from birth. This is certainly not something that I stated in my earlier post; I said that “I don’t know whether being gay is genetic, a learned behavior, or some combination of the two.” So even if this is a “myth,” it doesn’t affect my argument.

Dafydd argues that there are natural bisexuals who are more likely to lead homosexual lifestyles if homosexuality is socially accepted. He then reverts to his data from “Myth #1” to say that this is bad because homosexual lifestyles are more promiscuous. Ergo, we will have more promiscuity from bisexuals.

Again, there are several problems with the argument.

First, this once again appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with marriage. Nothing in Dafydd’s data tells us anything about the likely behavior of a bisexual in a committed monogamous relationship, or better yet, a marriage.

Second, it does not make intuitive logical sense to me that a given bisexual will lead a relatively more promiscuous lifestyle if that bisexual is allowed to conduct homosexual relationships free of social stigma. I suppose that the argument is that, because homosexuals are generally more promiscuous (something that may be true, but which Dafydd has not proven), that there will be more sexually available partners for the bisexual in question. But the bisexual will presumably have the same innate sex drive regardless of the gender of his or her sexual partners. So: is the determining factor in the bisexual’s promiscuity the availability of partners, the sex drive of the bisexual, some combination of the two, or something else entirely? Again, we don’t know, and Dafydd doesn’t tell us.

Even if one were to brush aside these problems, we are given no data as to how many natural bisexuals there are, so we have no idea how significant the “problem” would be. Dafydd says: “So in fact, the preferences of a group of people of undetermined size who can switch back and forth from living as gay to living as straight may indeed make a significant difference in the society.” But if the size of the group is “undetermined,” then we have no idea how “significant” the difference would be, and the use of the word “indeed” doesn’t mask that deficiency in the reasoning.

3) Dafydd labels as “Myth #3” the question: “How could same-sex marriage affect my marriage?” I’ll let Dafydd speak for himself:

When studying social questions, the proper approach is statistical — not individual. This argument is structurally identical to arguing that just because we can never prove for any one particular person whether his lung cancer is related to his habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, therefore we cannot say that smoking causes lung cancer.

But this is errant nonsense: statistically, those who smoke are at much higher risk of lung cancer than those who do not, regardless of whether we can prove causality in any particular case. The proof is that lung cancer is much more prevalent along the first group than the second. (Of course, to be completely scientific, you must account for other differences; but that is the essence of the proof.)

It’s beyond the scope of this particular response to argue the case that same-sex marriage damages the institution of marriage; that argument will come later. But all that will be necessary to prove at that time is that the institution as a whole is damaged… there is no need to prove that any specific marriage is directly damaged by some measurable quantum; and the lack of specific cases is no more an argument for same-sex marriage than is the lack of a particular causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer in any specific person an argument that smoking isn’t dangerous.

Dafydd may have a point in theory, but since his argument relates back to his defective data, which fails to make a relevant comparison of the promiscuity of gay and straight males (and females) in committed monogamous relationships, it fails.

Also: while one may have difficulty finding clear causation in a specific case, the complete absence of even one single demonstrable case tends to undercut the aggregate statistical argument. Have you ever met or heard of someone who smoked all their lives and got lung cancer? Of course. Have you ever met or heard of one single person who blamed gay marriage (or even the prospect of gay marriage) for the failure of their own heterosexual marriage — or credited the strength of their heterosexual marriage to the nonavailability of gay marriage?

Dafydd concludes: “Three myths exploded. Now future discussion can proceed on a logical basis, not an emotional one. (Fat chance.)” Given the lack of logic in his post, it’s an ironic statement.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love Dafydd. (Well, not “love . . .”) But I think this is a poor effort. I’m happy to have him tell me why I’m wrong in the comments.

Commenters: we have a pretty lively discussion about gay marriage in process in the earlier thread relating to Dafydd’s earlier column. Rather than splitting the discussion up into two or more posts, I’d like to keep the discussion there. So if you wish to comment on Dafydd’s “myths” post, or my response to it, go here.

UPDATE: Dafydd responds to my criticisms here; I respond here.

Comments are closed.


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