In honor of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' Prop 8 ruling, a rehashing of the anti-equality activists' obnoxious slippery slope arguments is below the jump.
Let's take a look at a couple of arguments that the anti-marriage crowd has made against marriage equality:
1. It's not traditional and has never been done before.
2. It will lead to polygamy and child marriage.
So shall we look at history according to anti-marriage activists then?
Never in human history has there been gay marriage. However, the anti-marriage crowd has never denied, in fact, something quite obvious: polygamy and child-marriage have been done before. It's been done in every culture on the planet. Same-sex marriage, however, has not.
So what does this lead us to?
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Aha! Child marriage and polygamy apparently existed without the prompting of homosexuals ruthlessly marrying one another! Hmm, so what does that lead us to?
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Well, if you are a polygamist or a pedophile, you must be wondering... why did we, in the West, at least, give up on such traditional marriages?
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Aha! We stopped doing the traditional child and polygamous marriages because we realized they were bad public policy! In a polygamous culture, there are, eventually, unattached males because wealthier males can afford to have multiple wives. Unattached males have less reason to conform their behavior to expected social norms, as they have, in a manner of speaking, less to live for. This would lead to a less stable society, a weakening of family ties, and a weaker bond to your society (not only are poor males poor, they are also loveless).
So, polygamy has been tried. It was deemed a bad idea, and abandoned.
Child marriage eventually came to be seen as bad for child welfare, and so we abandoned that as well. And that must lead us to this conclusion: we've already tried and dismissed as relics of human misadventure the two things the anti-marriage crowd says same-sex marriage will lead to. So, clearly, we should avoid their reoccurrence. But...
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But we already tried them. Unlike same sex marriage, we tried child marriage and polygamous marriage, and we found their usefulness lacking, so why on earth would the legalization of same-sex marriage lead us to, inevitably repeating the errors of our past? How can anyone make this claim, especially since WE'VE NEVER TRIED SAME SEX MARRIAGE BEFORE!
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Aha! We've never tried same sex marriage before! Got that? But we did try child marriage and polygamy before! Do you see what I am getting at here? Yes! It appears that absolutely NOTHING leads to child marriage or polygamous marriage. That's right! Before polygamy and before child marriage, the human record appears to have... NOTHING! Same sex marriage NEVER existed before, yet we still got child marriage and polygamous marriage. WAIT! Wait a second there...
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There was never ever in all of human history same sex marriage. There was never, ever a homosexual marriage before there was child marriage and polygamous marriage. So where did they come from? The child marriages, we can presume were heterosexual since there were NO same-sex marriages, not even same-sex child marriages! The polygamous marriages were always --- wait for it --- heterosexual marriages! What does this mean? What on earth could it mean? What lead to these child marriages? To these polygamous marriages?
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Aha! Well the children being married off weren't boys --- they were girls, and since there was never ever any same sex marriage that means they were being married off to heterosexual males! And the polygamous marriages were about the sexual appetites of heterosexual males, which is why polygamy was always about one man and as many women as he could afford. So, what leads to child marriage and polygamous marriage?
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AHA! The heterosexual male sexual appetite leads to child marriage and polygamous marriage! I'm sorry straight men, we are going to have to neuter you. Get in line.