Update on Stanton vs. Campbell

Rather than save this for Friday, I think it's important enough to keep as current as possible.

Sometimes the confirmation is nice to have -- not that I really needed it in this case. I know the subject as well as anyone who's not a specialist, I think, so I was on pretty solid ground in my objections to Stanton's "rebuttal," which I discussed here. Now, Patrick Campbell has responded and hits three of the points I raised in more detail. I said something to the effect of "watch for a constantly changing definition of "marriage" -- lo and behold:

Of interest, Stanton shape-shifts the definition of marriage. His report uses definitions from anthropologists that are inclusive of same-sex marriage because the central feature of marriage is the social and economic ties a marriage creates: biological sex does not matter. In the response to my critique he says: “as Christians, we define marriage as a union of one man and one woman. But biological connection is not a requirement.” If biological connection is not a requirement, then he has no issue with same-sex marriages provided one individual changes his or her performed gender. However, in his report he dismisses as legitimate gender transformed same-sex marriages, recognized by their societies as “one man with one woman.” Stanton then demands examples of same-sex marriage using falling in love, raising children, and living together as the important defining criteria for marriage. If these are the defining criteria for marriage, then most heterosexual marriages throughout history do not qualify. As historian Stephanie Coontz indicates, “not until the late eighteenth century, and then only in Western Europe and North America, did the notion of free choice and marriage for love triumph as a cultural ideal.”4 Historically, traditionally, cross-culturally, marriage is a social and economic union that creates social ties: love is irrelevant, in many societies biological sex is irrelevant, and in some societies even whether a groom is alive is irrelevant. . . .

In addition, Stanton demonstrates ethnocentrism by requiring that marriage be defined on his terms: if a society recognizes same-sex marriages as equal to opposite-sex ones, he dismisses them because they do not match his definition of marriage. However, using his criteria, we must argue that no society in the world has ever had marriage.

I also noted the time-honored, to use the term loosely, tactic of using studies that didn't deal with the question at issue:

Strangely, Stanton argues that same-sex parenting harms children because studies show that children do better in two-parent homes than in one-parent homes. The argument is a non sequitur: same-sex households are two-parent homes. The studies he uses do not compare two-parent same-sex households to two-parent opposite-sex ones and are therefore irrelevant to the discussion.

Stanton is by no means the first to try this bait-and-switch -- James Dobson has been using it for years.

Please keep in mind what I said about the likelihood of getting an honest discussion on this issue from anyone associated with Focus on the Family. It's probably not going to happen. I'm not going to say in Stanton's case that he is deliberately being mendacious. It may very well be that his mindset is so limited and rigid that he simply cannot recognize the full scope of the issue, or even when he's refuting himself.

And of course, I urge you to read Campbell's post in its entirety. He actually discusses a couple more points I raised, from a less snarky, more scholarly viewpoint.