Friday, October 14, 2005

Came across this argument against gay marriage today:

I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.


This seems to be related to the circular notion that marriage is defined as being between a man and woman, so gays can't marry by definition. This complete butchering of the analogy tool is dissected properly in that post, and leads the same person and others to dissect all arguments against gay marriage they can think of; the former philosophically, the latter more legally.

But beyond all that, I really wanted to link this post, which reveals the AnalPhilosopher's analogy to be flawed for a surprising reason:

Many authors have assumed despotism without testing, because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans. However, empirical examples of ‘voting’ behaviours include the use of specific body postures, ritualized movements, and specific vocalizations, whereas ‘counting of votes’ includes adding-up to a majority of cast votes, integration of voting signals until an intensity threshold is reached, and averaging over all votes. Thus, democracy may exist in a range of taxa and does not require advanced cognitive capacity.

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