A "Serious Person's" Thoughts on Marriage

That's Serious Person in the Eschaton sense -- i.e., all the other Serious People listen to him, so he must be Serious.

Andrew Sullivan has some comments on this piece of tripe from Dinesh D'Souza. I'm sorry, but it really is tripe -- from the first paragraph, D'Souza reveals himself as terminally shallow and probably not terribly intelligent -- or totally mendacious. (I mean, this essay is really mind-numbingly ignorant.) It's a piece that's very easy to take apart statement by statement -- the few that are factually accurate rest on really shaky foundations. In fact, it's such a piece of crap that I'm not going to waste time doing that. My time is better spent sitting here waiting for the next volume of Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight to come out in English.

What's got Sullivan's back up is this one:

In issuing its ruling the California court appealed to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The basic logic is that gays have a right to be treated like everyone else. But just like everyone else, gays do have the right to marry. They have the right to marry adult members of the opposite sex!

I mean, this is a joke, right? I suppose D'Souza can be excused for expecting anyone to take that statement seriously -- after all, Sullivan did. Sullivan's problem is that somehow he's become convinced that D'Souza is a Serious Person who has Things To Say that we should listen to. (That seems to be a pattern among the Washington elite. No wonder the rest of the country laughs at them.) On the basis of this essay, that's obviously not true. But to advance that fourth-grade debater's trick as a legitimate argument? Are you serious? He must have staffers from The Onion ghostwriting his stuff.

(It's worth noting how heavily D'Souza relies on a tactic that I've seen most often in anti-evolutionist screeds: take half a statement, treat it as the whole statement, and refute it. In this example, "gays do have the right to marry" is obviously false because what D'Souza leaves out is the rest of the right to marriage as defined by the courts: the person of their choice.

Ed Brayton has rather more telling criticisms than Sullivan can seem to come up with.