By Rodney Kennedy
Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that same-sex marriage is a religious freedom issue. Last year, Mohler told an audience at Brigham Young University that Mormons and Southern Baptists face numerous threats to religious liberty. “I do not believe we are going to heaven together,” he told his Mormon audience, “but I do believe we may go to jail together.”
My concern here is not so much with Dr. Mohler’s deep convictions against same-sex marriage. He has every right to argue against same-sex marriage. What concerns me is the argument that Dr. Mohler has employed. Known in the discipline of rhetoric as the argument from consequences, this is an informal fallacy and is more rooted in emotion than in logic. In all fairness, Dr. Mohler didn’t invent this particular argumentative form, but he is an expert at employing it to maximum benefit for his audience.
I have dubbed the argument from consequences “the apocalyptic bomb” argument. Preachers are especially prone to using this argumentative strategy. It is so tempting to paint imaginary scenarios of what might happen if certain laws are passed or certain practices are permitted.
I have used this same line of argument for other issues. For example, in an attempt to stop legislation that made it legal to carry guns in Ohio, I wrote articles that depicted a state awash in even more violence. Years earlier, I opposed casino gambling with arguments about the wasteland of gambling and predicted absolute disaster for our economy, our families and our state. In retrospect, I still oppose guns and gambling, but my arguments were flawed. I haven’t changed my positions; I have changed my arguments.
Here are a few of the problems with arguing from assumed consequences: Judging the future consequences of an event is known in rhetoric as the pragmatic argument. Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, in The New Rhetoric, say, “No justification is necessary for it to be accepted by common sense.”
An argument that doesn’t require evidence and warrants is easy to employ, not so easy to produce truth. When arguments move into “future tense” depictions and descriptions, they move into an extra-rational environment created by the deep emotion and conviction of the speaker. Audiences often choose to accept “apocalyptic bomb” arguments because they connect with their emotional fears and convictions. Saying that same-sex marriage will cause the loss of religious liberty in America stretches the bounds of credulity. Similar disaster arguments were made by Southern white preachers about the civil rights movement.
At the minimum, when you are presented with such arguments, you should attempt to defuse the “apocalyptic bomb” and ask serious questions about whether or not the speaker is dealing in truth or in futuristic fantasy that will not turn out the way he claims. Saying that the proponents of same-sex marriage must be wrong, because if they are right bad things will occur, is not a credible argument.
“Closely related to the slippery slope is what lawyers call a parade of horrors – an array of examples of terrible consequences that will or might follow if we travel down a certain path. A good example appears in Justice William Brennan’s opinion for the Supreme Court in Texas v. Johnson (1989), concerned with a Texas law against burning the American flag in political protest. If this law is allowed to stand, Brennan suggested, we may next find laws against burning the presidential seal, state flags and the Constitution” (Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau, From Critical Thinking to Argument: A Portable Guide).
What will be the lasting effects of same-sex marriage? It’s too early to tell, but Dr. Mohler is preparing himself for this inevitable outcome. As he admits in his own argument: “Twenty years ago, not one nation on earth had legal same-sex marriage. Now, we are told that 40 percent of Americans live where same-sex marriage is legal. A sense of inevitability now hangs over the entire nation.”
Or read differently, a sense of joy and acceptance pervades much of the nation in honor of freedom, dignity and diversity. I prefer the latter argument to the former, and I feel a sense of gratitude at being able to participate in this debate about human sexuality, but I have no inside track to the future outcomes.