Slippery-slope, gay marriage, law, morality

Thanks all the feedbacks. These are way above my expectation.




Just to be clear at the outset, the slippery slope in my slippery-slope argument against legalizing gay marriage is social morality. It is a slippery slope because of the desensitizing and contagious effects of sins.




It is common human experience that the more we decide to act against our conscience and against God's laws, the more likely our heart will become callous and hence we are more likely to fall into further temptation and sins even more. As one of the Chinese saying goes, "to do it once is dirty; to do it twice is filthy". In economic parlance, the marginal costs of sinning tend to decrease as we sin more. Once we get our hands dirty with the first sinful act, it does not really make our hands much dirtier by committing further sins.




Moreover, sins are contagious. The more we see our peers and neighbours do something bad, the less shameful and the more inclined we are to follow suit by doing the same or other sins.




Gordon Wong wrote:




I don’t understand the relevancy between objecting to the slippery-slope argument and how we personally feel about sexual activities of our relatives.




Like homosexuality and gay marriage, those sexual misdeeds of our relatives which I hypothesized are sinful acts that, to different degrees, deviate from God's moral laws regarding human sexuality and marriage. The reason I mentioned them and asked for the response of those objecting to my use of slippery-slope argument is that they are sins that, in spite of years of brainwashing and liberal propaganda, are still being viewed as repugnant by a majority of the general public. By placing them side-by-side with homosexuality and gay marriage, I hope to help my readers to see their inconsistency of strongly objecting to one set of unbiblical acts while accepting or being highly sympathetic to homosexuality and gay marriage. This is also the main thrust of my original slippery-slope argument.




As I can see it, there are two main objections to the use of slippery-slope argument against the legalizing gay marriage.




One is that gay marriage may not lead to the legalization the other, more deplorable, sexual relationships.




A second objection is that homosexuality/ gay marriage is a significantly different moral issue than the other more objectionable issues like polygamy, incest and bestiality. My use of the hypothesized sexual misdeeds of the objectors' relatives and their awful consequences help address this second objection.




As for the first objection of whether or not it is likely that legalization of polygamy, bestiality, and incest may follow, my other postings provide some inputs and indicators (especially regarding polygamy. If this is deemed insufficient, may I remind my readers (especially those in the US) that it will just take one decision by the US Supreme Court case to make the legalization in the US of such pervert relationships a reality. And we can be almost be certain that anti-Christian organizations like ACLU (the American Civil Liberty Union) will do their utmost to encourage this to happen. In the highly litigatious culture of US, there will be no shortage of potential plaintiffs for such court cases, who may consider themselves heroes in civil right activism.




By the way, there are a lot of liberal scholors who do not believe that Bible is against homosexuality by adducing various sorts of cultural contexts to confine the application of those anti-homosexual verses to the particular cultures in which those biblical books were written. I will not go into these here. If anyone is interested, I may point them to some liberal and conservative commentaries on this hermaneutical issue.





Gordon Wong wrote:




(1) Did I do everything possible to teach him the right lifestyle? -- How is slippery slope applicable here? Aren’t conservatives always saying that it is the parents’ responsibility to teach their children what’s right and what’s wrong (and why conservatives are against teaching good diet habit, exercise etc. in school)? When you apply slippery slope, you are saying that if gay marriage is legalized, then parents can no longer teach their children that gay is wrong? This just doesn’t make sense. Gambling is now legal almost everywhere, can I not tell my children that gambling is wrong? Soda soft-drink is definitely legal. Does this mean that parents cannot refuse their kid’s demand for soft-drink?




I have never written that parents can no longer teach their children that gay is wrong. The problem is that once gay marriage become legal, schools and media can tell our kids with a much firmer and louder voice that gay sex is good and gay marriage is as normal as heterosexual marriage. Conversely, voices against homosexuality and gay relationship will be repressed and banished from the public arena. This will make your life as parents much much harder.





Gordon Wong wrote:




An interesting note and question to conservatives: if family teaching is so important, how come we have so many well-known conservative politicians with gay and lesbian children and family members (e.g. Dick Cheney, Alan Keyes, Pat Buchannen etc.)




Yes, these incidents are sad, but conservatives are fighting an uphill battle against the degrading moral influences and pressures in the public arena. I don't know about how VP Dick Cheney, Alan Keyes, and Pat Buchannen raised and taught their kids. But the fact that their kids chose not to follow their parents' example, practice, and teaching does not necessarily imply that their parents had not tried.






Gordon Wong wrote:




Will legalizing gay marriage reduce this risk by encouraging long term, committed relationship?





I doubt it. Sometime ago, I read of some statistics from the Western European countries where gay marriage has been legalized. These show that many gays choose not to wed anyway. As I see it, the main reason the homosexuals fight for the legalization of gay marriages is not to get legally wedded and to form a legal family, but to gain acceptance of their abnormal lifestyles and to not feel rejected and inferior by their nations and communities. In this regard, it is closely similar to the atheist surgeon-lawyer Micheal Newdow in California who sued the US government against voluntary swearing the Pledge of Allegiance in the public schools and against the use of Bible in President Bush's 2004 inauguration ceremony. What Newdow really wants is not to feel inferior being an atheist in a Christian-dominated US culture. Sadly, for both Newdow and gay marriage fighters, they chose the wrong approaches to try to meet a genuine need (the need to be accepted by their communities and culture). To the extent I believe that God is real, that the Bible teaches against homosexuality and that such moral laws are written in people's hearts (as the Book of Romans teaches), I don't believe that real social acceptance may be forced and imposed by a piece of legislation or court decision, even if Newdow and the homosexuals had won their cases legally.





Gordon Wong wrote:




I made this statement in another article on football gambling: If we want to criminalize all immoral behavior, then why don’t we also criminalize all the restaurants selling unhealthy; exotic food?




And I think not long ago you were the one strongly arguing against government regulation of business activities. Why are conservatives so obsessed about one kind of sin (sexual behavior) but willing to look the other-way for all other sinful activities under the disguise of “free market economy”?




Yes, I agree that not all immoral acts should be criminalized. In fact, I remember that, in my reply to you, I list out some criteria for judging whether not government control in a free-market economy is justified. Similar criteria (and possibly others) may be applied for deciding whether or not an immoral act should be criminalized, as follows:




1. the sources of the free-market failures can be clearly identified (e.g. smoking, obesity, emssion from vehicles, pollution from specific industries, land use, and industrial establishment, the use of seat-belt)




2. the scope and impact of those free-market failures can be fairly precisely assessed,




3. the costs of enforcing legislation (and assessing/ collecting the tax, if it is a tax legislation) do not exceed their benefits




4. the government control is not too intrusive into the citizen's privacy.




As far as gay marriage is concerned, I think it should remain illegal because the cost of enforcing the prohibition by refusing to issuing marriage licenses to the gay /lesbian couples is relatively low, and the benefit of this prohibition to society is high.




As far as I know, conservatives in the US did not choose to be obsessed with the issues of homosexuality and gay marriage. It is that such issues are forced upon us by the social liberals and civil right activists. Liberals like to brag that they do not force their values on others. But in the case of the hate crime legislation and the legalization of gay marriage, they are making use of every legal and political resources accessible to them to impose acceptance of their perverted practice on the conservatives, and we have no choice but to resist and fight back.

Kar Yan Ng
2005-02-19 16:21:56

Response by Gordon Wong

I think that you have clarified some of your positions. But I like to call your attention to several issues related to inconsistency in your logic:


1. It is not unreasonable to speculate based on slippery slope that legalization of gay marriage may lead to further collapse of sexual morality. But slippery slope is a two-edged sword. You have to be consistent in your approaches to government regulation. Giving the government power to regulate “morality” is a very serious and dangerous issue, clearly inconsistent with the US constitution on freedom of religion.



Someone against government regulation can easily argue that: Today government can ban gay marriage. Tomorrow it can then regulate extra marital sex. Next year it can regulate immoral hard-core publications; then soft-core; then books containing “immoral” description of sexual activities; then books containing messages found by those in power as immoral … This is just a valid argument based on slippery slope as yours. And from history we know that given the opportunity, governments will do this!



In the US, slippery slope has never been accepted as a valid logic to support a piece of legislation.



2. Now applying your four criteria for criminalization, just look at your first criteria:



the sources of the free-market failures can be clearly identified (e.g. smoking, obesity, emission from vehicles, pollution from specific industries, land use, and industrial establishment, the use of seat-belt) …



As far as gay marriage is concerned, I think it should remain illegal because the cost of enforcing the prohibition by refusing to issuing marriage licenses to the gay /lesbian couples is relatively low, and the benefit of this prohibition to society is high.



In the area of marriage and sexual activities, what’s the role of the free market and where had the free market failed? How can you assess scope and impact of this failure?



Your own logic to criminalize (or regulate) gay marriage fails here! You reached your third and forth criteria without meeting (or even discussing) your first two criteria. You can’t set up a standard, and then violate your own standard to get to your conclusion.



3. I have never written that parents can no longer teach their children that gay is wrong. The problem is that once gay marriage become legal, schools and media can tell our kids with a much firmer and louder voice that gay sex is good and gay marriage is as normal as heterosexual marriage. Conversely, voices against homosexuality and gay relationship will be repressed and banished from the public arena. This will make your life as parents much much harder.



Your logic appears to be:
If gay marriage is legalized -> louder voice that gay sex is good -> voices against homosexuality and gay relationship will be repressed and banished from the public area


But in this logic, at least at the 2nd link, is without merit. Consider the following example:
Extra-marital sex is legalized -> louder voice that extra-marital sex is good (I think this is a valid observation) -> Voice against extra-marital sex is repressed and banished from the public area (This is clearly a false statement, discussion about the ill of extra-martial sex is going on all the time.)



Again, I want to point out that we are actually having the same conclusion regarding gay marriage – it should remain illegal. But if all Christians can offer are just these illogical statements, I am afraid that we will lose this battle again, just the same way we lost the battle on football gambling.



The key, in my opinion, is to argue against legalization of gay marriage by concentrating on the issue of destabilization of family and society from a secular perspective. Years of left-wing social engineering already has given us lots of data on why we need stable family with biological parents. We cannot force the secular world to accept Christian moral standards, but it is human nature to want stable families.