The Enlightened Despot

Via Patrick Appel, two Canadians are about to become the first to attempt the journey down the famous Slippery Slope of Gay Marriage:

Winston Blackmore, 52, and James Oler, 44, are each accused of being married to more than one woman at a time. The charges carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison, British Columbia Attorney General Wally Oppal said.

But Blackmore’s lawyer, Blair Suffredine, said during a telephone interview that marriage standards in Canada have changed.

“If (homosexuals) can marry, what is the reason that public policy says one person can’t marry more than one person?” said Suffredine, a former provincial lawmaker. Canada’s Parliament extended full marriage rights to same-sex couples in 2005.

This will no doubt strike most people who favor gay marriage as very bad news, as slippery slope fans will now have an actual real-world event to point to when they want to frighten people. That is certainly a shame, but I have to say I wish these guys the best (in their quest for legalized polygamy - they’re clearly both wackjobs whose best might not be so great for the rest of us.) I find both sides of the slippery slope debate - those who say it exists, so we can’t allow gay marriage and those who say it doesn’t exist, so we can - fairly far off the mark. These Canadians have it right - the slope is there, and we should get down it as quickly as possible.

But that’s a bit too vague. One irritating thing about the gay marriage debate in general, and talk of the slippery slope in particular, is that people on all sides of the issue almost never make it clear which of three related questions they are discussing:

(i) Does the proposition that gay marriage is morally permissable entail that polygamy, incest, etc. are also morally permissable?
(ii) Does the proposition that gay marriage should be legal entail that polygamy, incest, etc. should also be legal?
(iii) Does the proposition that laws prohibiting gay marriage are unconstitutional imply that laws against polygamy, incest, etc. are also unconstitutional

Clearly, (i) and (ii) are related, but they are very different questions. Saying nasty things to your mother is usually not morally permissable, but I doubt even Mike Huckabee thinks it should be illegal. In a perfect world, (iii) would have nothing to do with (i) or (ii); as it is, most people think questions like (iii) are just long-hand for questions like (ii). In any event, it’s impossible to have a coherent debate without being clear about which of these questions you are adressing.

I get the impression that most people in favor of gay marriage are thinking of (i) when they write the slippery slope off as preposterous and offensive. There’s nothing wrong with being gay, and there’s a lot wrong with screwing your sister, so where do these jerks get off comparing the two? I myself am inclined to say that most behaviors that make their way into slippery slope discussions are morally A-OK, though in some cases creepy and unpleasant to think about. But whatever one thinks about this, I don’t see how (i) can possibly be worth arguing about. Different opinions on these questions are based on ethical differences that are far too fundamental for a debate about them to be of much use. If God’s feelings are an important factor in determining what is moral, the slippery slope might not be plausible at all, but that probably depends on the god. Fortunately, (i) isn’t particularly relevant; (ii) and (iii) are where all the action is.

I cannot fathom how anyone can seriously argue that the answer to (iii) is not very obviously “yes”. The Constitution has absolutely nothing to say about marriage, sex, homosexuality, polygamy, incest, or any of the rest of it. I have never seen a remotely plausible argument that some laws about with whom one can fornicate and to whom one can be married are in conflixt with the text while others are not. If someone has such an argument, I’d love to hear it.

(ii) strikes me as somewhat less obvious, but I’m pretty sure the slippery slope works here too. Gay marriage should be legal because it’s usually right to let people do whatever the hell they want as long as they aren’t hurting anyone but themselves, and because if government should be involved in formally recognizing a social convention like marriage - which is debatable - it should use as broad an understanding of that convention as possible. That reasoning seems to me to argue just as persuasively in favor of polygamy.

So the slippery slope works where it counts. But that’s not such a bad thing. Yes, a man should have the right to marry three of his brothers. But we’d all still have the right to keep our distance.