{"id":4116,"date":"2013-03-27T06:58:17","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T11:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4116"},"modified":"2013-03-27T06:58:17","modified_gmt":"2013-03-27T11:58:17","slug":"those-who-dont-know-anything-love-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4116","title":{"rendered":"Those who don’t know anything love the…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ignoratio.<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 Charles Cooper, arguing yesterday to defend California’s Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court, embraced the old strategy of invoking unknown harms to come from allowing gay marriage. [Transcript HERE<\/a>] Justice Kagan asks Cooper if allowing same-sex marriage hinders state interests. Cooper responds:<\/p>\n

]Your Honor, we \u00e2\u20ac\u201d we go further in \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in the sense that it is reasonable to be very concerned that redefining marriage to \u00e2\u20ac\u201d as a genderless institution could well lead over time to harms to that institution and to the interests that society<\/strong> has always \u00e2\u20ac\u201d has \u00e2\u20ac\u201d has always used that institution to address.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kagan then asks Cooper to clarify.\u00c2\u00a0 She asks:<\/p>\n

What harm you see happening and when and how<\/strong> and \u00e2\u20ac\u201d what \u00e2\u20ac\u201d what harm to the institution of marriage or to opposite-sex couples, how does this cause and effect work?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then Justice Kennedy jumps in to encourage Cooper to concede that there are no actual harms done:<\/p>\n

Well, then are \u00e2\u20ac\u201d are you conceding the point that there is no harm<\/strong> or denigration to traditional opposite-sex marriage couples? So you’re conceding that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Cooper won’t back down.\u00c2\u00a0 Just because he can’t name any harms or articulate how allowing gay marriage would cause heterosexuals not to marry, or have kids, or raise them right… won’t prevent him from saying bad things will happen.<\/p>\n

The first one is this: expert acknowledged that redefining real-world consequences, and that it is impossible for anyone to foresee the future accurately enough to know exactly what those real-world consequences would be. And among those real-world consequences, Your Honor, we would suggest are adverse consequences.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But consider the California voter, in 2008, in the ballot booth, with the question before her whether or not this age-old bedrock social institution should be fundamentally redefined, and knowing that there’s no way that she or anyone else could possibly know what the long-term implications of \u00e2\u20ac\u201d of profound redefinition of a bedrock social institution would be.<\/strong> That is reason enough, Your Honor, that would hardly be irrational for that voter to say, I believe that this experiment, which is now only fairly four years old, even in Massachusetts, the oldest State that is conducting it, to say, I think it better for California to hit the pause button and await additional information from the jurisdictions where this experiment is still maturing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, a rule about properly run ignoratio<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 The argument from ignorance runs that because we don’t have evidence that p, not-p follows.\u00c2\u00a0 There are two related conditions for using the form appropriately.\u00c2\u00a0 In one case, it’s right when the principle that were p true, we’d already have clear evidence for it<\/em> is true.\u00c2\u00a0 For some things, absence of evidence is evidence of absence.\u00c2\u00a0 The second condition is when those arguing for p have the burden of proof — that is when p’s being false clearly yields worse consequences from not-p being false.\u00c2\u00a0 So when there are known harms to come from one error (taking p to be true when it is in fact false) but none clearly coming from another (taking p to be false when it is true), p has the burden of proof.<\/p>\n

Now, take the SCOTUS case here.\u00c2\u00a0 Who has the burden of proof?\u00c2\u00a0 It seems, given the way the case is being handled, that the question is whether\u00c2\u00a0 Proposition 8 denies rights to a group of people.\u00c2\u00a0 If it does, then people have their rights stripped from them if the court strikes down the prior rulings holding it unconstitutional.\u00c2\u00a0 If it doesn’t, then if the court upholds the prior rulings, then rights have been extended in a case where it’s not necessary.\u00c2\u00a0 Those are the two errors possible.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Which is worse?\u00c2\u00a0 The former.\u00c2\u00a0 Waving one’s hand and trying to imagine worse consequences doesn’t change that.<\/p>\n

Enough about fallacies to close.\u00c2\u00a0 Now a moment about moral reasoning.\u00c2\u00a0 And conservatism.\u00c2\u00a0 I simply abhor the way the conservatives argue about gay marriage.\u00c2\u00a0 John’s last post<\/a> shows the deep mendacity of the movement, and this moment in front of the court is another case of the moral cowardice shown by those against marriage equality.\u00c2\u00a0 Since when do conservatives think that sacrificing the rights of a few to protect the bounty of the many is really acceptable?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ignoratio.\u00c2\u00a0 Charles Cooper, arguing yesterday to defend California’s Proposition 8 before the Supreme Court, embraced the old strategy of invoking unknown harms to come from allowing gay marriage. [Transcript HERE] Justice Kagan asks Cooper if allowing same-sex marriage hinders state interests. Cooper responds: ]Your Honor, we \u00e2\u20ac\u201d we go further in \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in the sense … Continue reading Those who don’t know anything love the…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,10],"tags":[696,178,559],"class_list":["post-4116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-appeal-to-fearthreat","category-ignoratio-elenchi","tag-elena-kagan","tag-gay-marriage","tag-scotus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4117,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116\/revisions\/4117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}