No real reasoning ability required, it seems; just an ability to distort the reasoning process.
But first of all, I disagree with Rod’s comment above. I don’t think the article is promoting the false arguments it delineates, simply stating what actually is the case, even though correct reasoning knows it is not. The article opens with:It should be clear by now that those who oppose the civil recognition of “same-sex marriage” are gradually (or perhaps not so gradually) losing the public debate. The problem is not that they have no arguments. It is that judges, legislators, journalists, and regular citizens have increasingly found those arguments not only weak but in fact incoherent from the standpoint of public reason.
That is the problem – the parlous state of current public reason, uninformed, as it is, by ignorance of correct moral principles.
But back to “the courts”. Here’s a paragraph from the article:In rejecting the traditional arguments mentioned above, both courts begin by observing that it has never been a requirement of marriage that couples actually have or plan to have children, or even that they are capable of doing so. At the same time, they note, some households headed by “same-sex partners” do have children, whether from previous relationships, legal adoptions, or various sorts of “reproductive technologies,” such as surrogacy or artificial insemination. Further, some “opposite-sex” couples do not have children, either by choice or from infertility. Hence, drawing a legal demarcation for purposes of marriage around “opposite-sex couples” because of their potential ability or decision to have children generates a simultaneously under-inclusive and over-inclusive legal classification. Consider the Perry case’s way of addressing this question:
Such specious reasoning! Of course, there has never been a requirement that couples have children, but for millennia, there has been the natural and normal assumption that heterosexual couples will form exclusive unions, and that the natural and normal result of sexual intercourse will be children. That is the result of applying honest reasoning to the essential nature of human beings, but modern legal argument obtains false conclusions by arguing from accidentals, not essence.
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