Opinion: Ontogeny Ripostes Ontology378 comments

A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch takes issue with an observation we made in February in the course of a column about the Washington Post's bias in favor of same-sex marriage:

A couple of months ago a writer at The Washington Post wondered how straight people could possibly think gay unions diminish the value of their own marriages. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto took issue with this, claiming it was "a straw man. We've been following this debate for years, and we've never heard opponents claim that same-sex marriage would diminish or endanger their own marriages. Their arguments are based on morality, tradition and worries about the effects on the institution of marriage.�.�.�."Really? The argument, then, seems to be this: While gay marriage might not ever harm any individual straight marriage, it still damages the institution of marriage as a whole.How, exactly, does it do this? Is there is some ontologically separate entity called Marriage that exists independent of all the marriages of all the couples in the world? There would have to be, according to the institution-of-marriage argument. But that makes no sense. After all, you would not say a virus "threatens humanity" if, in fact, no individual human person was ever harmed by the virus. Humanity is simply the sum of the humans in it. Nor could one reasonably contend "society" was harmed by the introduction of--oh, let's say rock music--if nobody ever suffered any harm from rock 'n' roll. If individual marriages do not suffer from the existence of gay marriage, then neither can "the institution of" marriage.It's this sort of foolishness that leads some proponents of same-sex marriage to question the motives of the other side

Hinkle's argument is complete sophistry. To illustrate why, let's take on his thought experiment involving a virus. First, we shall stipulate a few premises, which it is likely Hinkle already accepts, to wit:

Homosexuality is not a choice. Sexual orientation is inborn and immutable after birth. Homosexuality is not morally objectionable, and homosexual individuals have no lesser capacity for happy and worthwhile lives than heterosexual individuals have.

Now for our hypothetical virus. The Hinkle virus is so fast-spreading that it soon infects every person alive, but it is largely benign. It has no effect on men, and only two effects on women: (1) it is passed on to any children they have, and (2) any children they conceive after infection will be born homosexual.

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No human embryos were harmed in the construction of this thought experiment.

The Hinkle virus would seem to fit its namesake's criterion that it does no harm to any individual human person. We have established as a condition of the experiment--and we trust that in the real world Hinkle agrees--that it is not harmful to a woman to give birth to a homosexual child, nor is it harmful to a child to be born homosexual. And since the virus affects the sexual orientation only of the yet-unborn, it should not disrupt any existing heterosexual relationship.

Yet it should be obvious that the Hinkle virus would threaten humanity by dramatically reducing the incentive to reproduce. Presumably the next generation would stave off complete extinction by means of artificial insemination, but it's preposterous to think that fertility in an all-homosexual society would come anywhere near the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman (or 4.2 per lesbian couple).

The foregoing is not an argument against same-sex marriage but rather a defense of a form of argument that Hinkle makes an embarrassing philosophical error in categorically rejecting. Humanity is not "simply the sum of the humans in it" any more than A. Barton Hinkle is simply the sum of the cells in him, or those cells are the sum of the atoms in them.

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