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Having Lost the Same-Sex Marriage Fight, What Will Opponents Do Now? (2 of 2)

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gay marriageI summarized the abrupt about-face we’ve seen on the same-sex marriage issue in Part 1. Let’s continue with a thought experiment I posed to the Christian opponents of same-sex marriage as they reorganize behind the demand that they be allowed to deny service to same-sex couples.

Discriminate against a gay couple? How about against a mixed-race couple? Would that be justified as well?

Few modern Christians would support discrimination based on the ethnicity of customers, and they contort themselves trying to show that discriminating against a gay couple is perfectly reasonable while discriminating against a mixed-race couple is unthinkable. Let’s explore some of their rationalizations.

Response 1: Homosexuality is a behavior, not a race. Homosexuality requires action, which you can choose or not choose to do.

No, sexual orientation and ethnicity are both part of what you are.

Sure, a homosexual could choose to remain celibate. So could you, Mr. Christian. If that would be an outrageous imposition on you, why impose it on someone else? Consensual safe sex causes no more harm if it’s homosexual rather than heterosexual.

By contrast, religion is something you choose. Christianity—or at least its outdated attitudes—is something you are able to discard. (Might be something to consider.)

Response 2: “You keep playing the race card. But the way blacks were treated is much different that the way the gays are treated. Blacks were slaves, weren’t allowed to vote, were forced to use separate facilities, etc. That’s not what’s happening to gays. They aren’t being enslaved or having their freedoms taken away. Quite frankly, it’s an outlandish and offensive example.” Source

(And bonus points for the outrage! Wow—who’s taking the moral high road now?!)

No one claims that the oppression of African Americans was the same as injustices done to homosexuals; the point is that they’re both injustices.

“No one talks about same-race marriages. Why? Because it’s irrelevant. Race has no bearing on marriage.”

Agreed, but you’re able to say that only because American Christians have moved on. That wouldn’t have been true just a few decades ago. Consider the original conviction that became the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case that overturned state and local laws against mixed-race marriage in the U.S. The trial judge in the original case gave a clear biblical foundation for the moral error of mixed-race marriage:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Remember the xkcd graph discussed in Part 1. When mixed-race marriage was legalized nationwide in 1967, most Americans disapproved. Yes, race has no bearing on marriage, and yes, no one talks about it anymore, but that wasn’t the case just a few decades ago.

Response 3: Where will these impositions on business owners end? Suppose a restaurant owner didn’t want to sell alcohol or a kiosk owner didn’t want to sell pornography. Could they be forced to?

That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about public accommodation. Restaurants, apartment buildings, stores, and public universities must provide equal access. A restaurant isn’t forced to sell alcohol and a kiosk isn’t forced to sell porn, but if they do, they must provide equal access to customers regardless of race, sexual orientation, and so on.

Response 4: Oh, come on—this is a red herring. No one opposes interracial marriage. That’s not the official view of any major religion. Same-sex marriage, however, is widely rejected by religious authorities.

This is just a bandwagon argument—lots of people and authorities think my way, so you should adopt it. If popularity were the issue, the rapid about-face we’ve seen in polls should shut down this issue. But it’s not. The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to avoid the tyranny of the majority over a minority.

The fact remains that “My honest religious beliefs prohibit me from serving an X couple” applies whether X is “same-sex” or “mixed-race.” The logic of your argument allows both options. I’m simply rubbing your nose in it—if you don’t like the consequences of your argument, drop it.

Response 5: “Race is irrelevant to marriage while gender is essential to it. There is nothing wrong with interracial marriages because men and women are designed for one another and can procreate regardless of their racial background.” — Frank Turek

Ah, the “marriage = procreation” argument—an oldie but a goodie! I wonder if that’s all Turek gets out of the marriage vows. “I promise to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow,” doesn’t sound like “Make babies!” to me.

It’s easy to smoke out these Christians’ true opinions on the subject. Ask these opponents of same-sex marriage why a straight couple should get married instead of living together, and the procreation argument goes out the window, replaced with profound thoughts about love and commitment—precisely the reason same-sex couples want to get married.

I’ve skewered this argument more here.

“Ironically, it’s not conservatives but homosexual activists who are acting like racists. Instead of asking the state to recognize the preexisting institution of marriage, homosexuals are asking the state to define marriage. That’s exactly what racists were trying to do to prevent interracial marriage.”

Gays want marriage expanded. Racist anti-miscegenists wanted it restricted. See the difference?

Before you make the “but marriage has been one man plus one woman since Day 1!” argument, consider the many odd and unpleasant kinds of hookups recognized by the Old Testament.

Response 6: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. … In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing.” — Sen. Rick Santorum (2003)

And now we have the slippery slope argument. Do bigamy, polygamy, bestiality, incest, or pedophilia cause harm? If so, then you see the difference between Santorum’s fevered, straight-laced imagination and the issue at hand. Consensual, safe gay sex causes no more problem than consensual, safe straight sex.

And don’t imagine that marriage has had one definition since forever. Society has changed it many times (more).

[Gay sex] destroys the basic unit of our society.… Whether it’s polygamy, whether it’s adultery, whether it’s sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.

Sounds like we’ve devolved into the “gay sex is icky” argument. Hey, Senator, if you don’t like gay sex, don’t have any. Problem solved.

Final thoughts

Conservative Christians, you’re seriously telling me that there’s such an abundance of love in the world that you can get in the way of homosexuals who only want the marriage that you’ve got? Aren’t there enough actual problems in the world that we can work on instead?

Drop the petulant, backwards-looking attitude. Your mistake was letting politicians lead you around by the nose, and they led you into an indefensible dead end. The next time politicians buzz around like flies and tell you that the sky is falling, tell them to take a hike. Tell them that you’re able to figure out social issues on your own.

I stayed because my pastor told me that God hates divorce.
It didn’t cross my mind that God might hate abuse, too.
— Beverly Gooden

Photo credit: Jeremy Richardson

Having Lost the Same-Sex Marriage Fight, What Will Opponents Do Now?

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homosexuality gay marriageReverend Francis Schaefer is no longer a reverend. (I’m talking about the former United Methodist minister, not the theologian Francis Schaeffer who died in 1984.) Schaefer was defrocked a year ago because he officiated at his gay son’s 2007 wedding. His Methodist denomination states that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Schaefer was recently reinstated. His case was heard last week by the church’s highest court, the Judicial Council. It is expected to rule on Schaefer’s fate any day now. [UPDATE 10/27/14: the Judicial Council decided in Schaefer’s favor, and he has been allowed to remain an ordained minister.]

Current state of the gay-marriage issue

Two years ago, in the weeks before the 2012 U.S. election, conservative pundits gloated about their 32 victories over the previous decade and a half, an unbroken record of rejection for same-sex marriage. Six states and Washington D.C. had legalized same-sex marriage at that point, but they had done so through the legislature or court decisions, not through voter initiatives.

What a difference two years make. Three same-sex marriage initiatives won in the 2012 election, including the one in my own state of Washington. More victories trickled in. Three weeks ago, the Supreme Court declined to review three appellate court rulings, which allowed a number of lower-court rulings to stand and put most Americans in states that allowed same-sex marriage.

The next day, Nevada and Idaho joined the list. Then West Virginia, and then North Carolina, and then Alaska. Ten days ago, Arizona and Wyoming. That makes 32 states in which same-sex marriage is legal.

(Look in the dictionary and you’ll see this turnaround as the top example for the word schadenfreude.)

The comic xkcd has an enlightening graph that contrasts acceptance through public opinion vs. state-by-state legality for two issues: mixed-race marriage and same-sex marriage. The two issues played out surprisingly differently. For mixed-race marriage, legality was out in front, and even after it was legal nationwide in 1967, public acceptance was a minority opinion.

With same-sex marriage, it was the other way around. Public opinion was the leader (56% approving vs. 37% disapproving at the moment), which supported the landslide of states approving it in the last two years.

Conservatives lost the gay marriage issue; what hijinks are next?

The gay marriage issue in the United States has been used by politicians as a vote getter. They play Chicken Little and insist that the sky is falling. They’ll cry that only by voting for them will the looming catastrophe be avoided. That this “catastrophe” doesn’t exist seems not to have hurt their cause.

Or, at least it hadn’t in the past. Many voters now find the anti-gay stance offensive, and it is turning many young people away from churches that embrace that message. Since Plan A has soured, what’s next?

Conservative politicians and Christians see the writing on the wall. Going forward, homosexuality will be to them as morally relevant as left-handedness, another inborn trait the church historically was on the wrong side of. We’ll be on the same page, at least on this moral issue.

Kidding! In fact, Mike Huckabee, perhaps to demonstrate his presidential timber, recently doubled down on the losing position. A GOP that went flaccid on same-sex marriage, Huckabee said, would lose members like himself. The conservative position may morph into a rear-guard action that does nothing useful as it simply tries to slow the inevitable. It may wane only as these conservatives they die off.

#AtheistVoter

The right to impose one’s will on others

We will have more of the Gay Cake Food Fight in our future. The obligation to treat homosexual customers equally seems to be the new battleground and “religious liberty” the new battle cry.

Elane Photography refused to provide services for a same-sex commitment ceremony in 2006 and lost in the New Mexico Supreme Court in 2013. One critique of that ruling:

The danger here is that the courts are now telling all of us that we must compartmentalize our religious beliefs. What we believe on a Sunday we cannot act upon on Monday or we will be in violation of the law.

Well, yeah. If what you believe on Sunday is morally indefensible, it won’t fly when you leave the church. You expect society to apologize for that?

Religious freedom exists in this country thanks to the U.S. Constitution and for no other reason. The Constitution calls the tune. Imagine that there’s a Law above the law if you like, but you’re bound first by the only law we can agree actually exists, the law of the land. When religious belief clashes with the law, guess which one wins?

If you need help answering that question, remember Davis v. Beason, the Supreme Court case that prohibited polygamy. From the unanimous decision:

However free the exercise of religion may be, it must be subordinate to the criminal laws of the country.

Discriminate against a gay couple? How about against a mixed-race couple?

Consider a parallel situation. Suppose someone had a deeply held Christian belief that mixed-race marriage was wrong. Would these Christians support denying mixed-race customers in that case?

There’s plenty of biblical support for this position.

Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons. (Deuteronomy 7:3)

Do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons or take their daughters for your sons (Ezra 9:12).

We promise not to give our daughters in marriage to the peoples around us or take their daughters for our sons (Nehemiah 10:30).

Is discriminating against a gay couple on religious grounds justified if discriminating against a mixed-race couple is not? Think about how Christians respond to this thought problem.

Concluded in Part 2.

We’ve got to stop being the stupid party.
— Bobby Jindal,
Republican governor of Louisiana

Photo credit: Patrick Giguère

God Belief as a Logic Puzzle

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apologeticsWhen I was a kid, I liked to read puzzle books and try to figure out the answers without looking in the back. I do remember one puzzle, though, that I couldn’t understand even after I read the answer.

Here’s a variant of that puzzle. See if you do any better.

The puzzle of the hidden dots

The abbot at the Logical Monastery was retiring. He had submitted logical tests and puzzles to the monks to find the most worthy successor. With three candidates remaining, he presented his final problem.

He arranged them in a circle facing each other. “Close your eyes,” the abbot said. “I will put on your forehead a dot of paint, either red or blue.”

The abbot put a red dot on each monk’s forehead. “Now open your eyes, and raise your hand if you see at least one red dot.”

Each monk raised his hand.

“The first one to identify the color of his dot, with the correct reasoning, will take my place as head of this monastery.”

Finally, one monk said, “My dot is red, and I know why.”

What was his reasoning?

If this puzzle is new to you, you may want to work on it before reading the answer below.

God belief as a logic puzzle

Some Christians have little use for evidence and arguments and are content to accept a remarkable claim from an authority such as a parent or a priest. But for those who need reasons to support their beliefs, however, this logic puzzle is analogous to what some apologists say God has set before us. You must read books. You must study philosophy. You must listen to lectures and watch debates. You must wrestle with and overcome your doubts. You must learn obtuse arguments like the Transcendental Argument or the Ontological Argument, and you must defeat challenges like the Problem of Evil or the Problem of Divine Hiddenness.

Apologists imagine God belief as this kind of obtuse puzzle, not because the evidence points that way but because they’re forced to. They have no choice, since the simpler and more desirable option—that God’s existence is as obvious as the existence of the next person you walk past in the street—is clearly not available to them. Unwilling to give up their beliefs or to admit that they’ve been wrong, they assume God, double down on faith, and invent these bizarre rationalizations.

Find the simpler explanation. A loving creator god who desired a relationship with his creation would just make himself known. We have insufficient evidence to overcome the default hypothesis, that God is yet another made-up supernatural being.

If you’re just going to go with “well, his ideas lived on,”
I’ll put Jesus behind Archimedes, Socrates, Euclid, Galileo, Newton,
Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein, Fleming, and Bohr in that regard.
All of their ideas are current today and of great value in modern society,
whereas Jesus espoused monarchy, slavery, and 2nd-class status for women.
— commenter Richard S. Russell

Photo credit: David Singleton

Appendix: The reasoning of the logical monk

I suppose the test should be equally hard for each participant. I see two red dots, and for us to have the same puzzle, symmetry would demand that we all see two red dots. But I can’t be sure that we were each given the same puzzle, so that assumption may be a trap.

Let me start with the facts: I see two red dots, and the options are (1) I have a blue dot and (2) I have a red dot.

Consider option 1 first. How would the other monks reason if I had blue? Since they each have red, they would see Red Guy and Blue Guy. They would think, “Suppose I had blue. Red Guy would see two blues—me and Blue Guy. He wouldn’t have raised his hand to say that he saw at least one red. But he did! So therefore the hypothesis ‘I have blue’ is false. So therefore I must have red!”

This is simple reasoning, and they would have given the answer within seconds. But that didn’t happen. Therefore option 1—that I have a blue dot—must be false.

Therefore, option 2 is true, and I have a red dot.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Cottingley Fairies

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Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle Cottingley FairiesIn 1917, two girls spent much of their summer playing by a stream. Repeatedly scolded for returning home wet and muddy, they said that they were playing with fairies. To prove it, they borrowed a camera and returned claiming that they had proof. That photo is shown here.

A total of five photos were taken over several years. The fairies were called the Cottingley fairies after Cottingley, England, the town where the girls lived.

A relative showed two of the photos at a 1919 public meeting of the Theosophical Society, a spiritualist organization. From there, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a devotee of spiritualism, took the baton. He wrote a 1920 article in The Strand Magazine that made the photos famous. (The Strand was also where Conan Doyle first published his Sherlock Holmes stories.) To his credit, Conan Doyle asked experts to evaluate the authenticity of the photos. The opinions were mixed, but he decided to support the story anyway.

Spiritualism, the popular belief that we can communicate with the spirits of the dead, was waning at the time of the article. Magician Harry Houdini, annoyed by fakers using tricks to defraud the gullible, devoted much time to debunking psychics and mediums in the 1920s until his death in 1926.

Houdini and Conan Doyle had been friends, but the friendship failed with their opposite views on spiritualism. Conan Doyle believed that Houdini himself had supernatural powers and was using them to suppress the powers of the psychics that he debunked. (I’ve written more about Conan Doyle’s susceptibility to magical thinking here.)

Research in 1983 exposed details of the Cottingley hoax, and the two principals finally admitted that they had faked the fairies using cardboard cutouts of drawings copied from a book.

The Amazing Randi 

Magician James Randi masterminded Project Alpha, a scheme to plant two fake psychics (Steve Shaw and Michael Edwards, actually talented amateur magicians) in the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research in 1979. Randi contacted the researchers before planting his fakes to caution them how to avoid being deceived. The advice was thorough and genuine, and if they’d followed it, they would have uncovered the trickery.

Two years later, after the lab’s impressive successes were well known within the psychic community and the fake psychics were celebrities, the deception was made public. The press was so bad that the McDonnell laboratory shut down.

The moral of the story is that unless you’re a magician, don’t pretend that you can expose a magician. Said another way, just because you’re smart (and let’s assume both that the researchers were smart and most skeptics are smart), don’t think that you can’t be duped. This was Conan Doyle’s failing.

Magician Ricky Jay said, “The ideal audience [for a magician] would be Nobel Prize winners. … They often have an ego with them that says, ‘I am really smart so I can’t be fooled.’ No one is easier to fool.”

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden,
you are deemed fit for the [loony] bin.
If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it,
you are deemed fit to govern the country.
— Jonathan Meades

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/2/12.)

Photo credit:Wikimedia

25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Part 6)

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stupid Christian arguments apologeticsLet’s continue with our exploration of stupid arguments Christians shouldn’t use (Part 1 here).

Stupid Argument #20a: Science can’t explain everything; therefore, God. The origin of life? Of consciousness? Of the universe? If you don’t have an answer, I do—God did it!

Science doesn’t have answers to some questions, and we’ll have to be patient. But some apologists seem desperate and insistent in their search for answers to life’s riddles. This is because they already have an answer. They started their investigation with an answer.

“Time’s up!” they say. “Pass your tests to the front.”

This apparent eagerness to understand reality is simply a smokescreen. They want to shoehorn in their answer for all puzzles, and science’s answers are irrelevant. If science did come up with a consensus view of a Christian’s puzzle du jour, our Christian would simply drop the resolved issue and find a new one.

Don’t tell me an issue is a big deal to you if it’s not. If your faith is built on science not having an answer to abiogenesis, say, then let’s talk about it. But if you have no skin in the game and you’re simply going to move the goalposts when you lose, it’s a waste of time.

Science is the only discipline that tells us new things about reality. As just one example of well-founded science, consider that we’re communicating with computers over the internet.

Stupid Argument #20b: Science has been wrong; therefore, God. What about Piltdown Man? The steady-state universe? The origin of the moon? Science changes its mind all the time! What kind of a reliable foundation is this?

Remember what it was that uncovered the Piltdown Man hoax, discovered that the universe is expanding, and improved our understanding of the origin of the solar system—it was science every time, not the Bible and not theologians or philosophers. Science is imperfect but self-correcting. Science delivers.

Stupid Argument #21a: Scientific illiteracy. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that.” — Bill O’Reilly

Actually, Bill, the big kids have understood for centuries how earth’s rotation and the gravitational effects of the sun and moon cause tides.

Another example of scientific cluelessness is Ray Comfort’s famous video where he holds up a banana and declares, “Behold the atheist’s nightmare!” No, Ray, the banana that God gave us was small, tasteless, and full of seeds. The sweet Cavendish banana that you held up is the result of thousands of years of human cultivation.

Ray’s “crocoduck” (his conclusion that since we don’t see a crocodile/duck hybrid, evolution is crap) gets an honorable mention.

We all have to start somewhere. If you’re scientifically or mathematically undereducated, compensate with an open mind. Too often what I see instead is scientific illiteracy combined, not with open-mindedness, but with hubris. If your education came from the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, or the Creation Research Institute, you’ve been poorly educated. Your confidence is misplaced.

Stupid Argument #21b: Mathematical illiteracy. The life of Jesus fulfilled 300 prophecies! The probability of just eight of these coming true randomly—that is, without him being the real deal—is 1 in 1017. Cover the state of Texas in silver dollars two feet deep and find a particular one, blindfolded, by dumb luck—that’s the equivalent probability.

Whatcha gonna say against probability, right? Actually, a fair amount: I dismantle that ridiculous argument here.

We humans have a surprisingly poor native grasp of probability. Another helpful puzzle is the Monty Hall problem. Give it a try and see how you do.

Stupid Argument #22: Relying on the ignorance of your audience. Put a single cell in a normal saline solution, and poke it with a needle. You’ve got all the elements of life, and yet you’ll never get life. Don’t tell me that evolution works!

I heard this while speaking to Intelligent Design proponent Jonathan Wells at a Discovery Institute book release event. I forgot what I asked to get this response, but it stopped me. I’d never heard this puzzle before and didn’t have anything to say in response.

But I do now. No biologist says that this was the step prior to this cell on its evolutionary progression, so the puzzle is meaningless. He’s right that you’ll never get life from that mixture, but no one said that you would. That cell came from another living cell and so on back through much speciation to the beginning of life on earth.

But, having a doctorate in molecular and cellular biology, Wells knew this. Why then pose this challenge? Why take advantage of my ignorance?

Here’s another example. I attended a presentation by Andrew Snelling (PhD in geology) of the Institute for Creation Research on radioisotope dating of Grand Canyon rocks (summary here). He collected a number of samples of amphibolite. They were from a single layer and so were all the same age. He sent them to two laboratories for four kinds of radioisotope dating. The date results were all over the map. Conclusion: radioisotope dating is unreliable.

Only after I did some research did I discover that amphibolite is metamorphic rock and that only igneous rock can be reliably radioisotope dated.

So a geologist (who knows that radioisotope dating isn’t reliable on metamorphic rocks) gets some metamorphic rocks, has them dated, and then is shocked—shocked!—when the dates aren’t reliable. A “devastating failure for long-age geology,” as the subtitle suggests? Not quite.

Snelling counted on the ignorance of his audience, and he fooled me—at least until he could get out of the auditorium. I was not amused, and this did nothing to build support for his position.

Continue with Part 7.

I conclude [that this fallacious reasoning]
must be a product of a brain unsatisfied with doubt;
as nature abhors a vacuum,
so, too, does the brain abhor no explanation.
It therefore fills in one, no matter how unlikely.
— Michael Shermer

Photo credit: Eric Petruno

Genetic and Ad Hominem Fallacies

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Genetic and Ad Hominem FallaciesIn 2012, the Heartland Institute (an American conservative think tank) put up a series of billboards featuring Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Charles Manson (a cult leader), and Fidel Castro (a dictator). The text was the same for each: “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?”

These are examples of the genetic fallacy. We’re asked, “How plausible can the claim of global warming be if these nutjobs accept it?” A genetic fallacy ignores any actual evidence or argument and looks instead at the origin (think genesis) of the argument. It’s a fallacy because it offers no relevant argument.

More examples

Another example would be, “You’re a vegetarian? Don’t you know that Hitler was a vegetarian?”

But consider this: “You can’t tell me that those new phosphorescent zucchinis are safe! Don’t you know that the research that supports that claim was funded exclusively by MegaCorp, the company that patented that vegetable?”

This makes more than a simple origins claim (X comes from/is supported by Y) and is more compelling. To make this a classic genetic fallacy, we’d need to strip it down like this: “Don’t tell me that phosphorescent zucchinis are safe! MegaCorp says they’re safe.” Maybe the research funded by MegaCorp was actually good science.

Genetic fallacies in Christianity?

Now consider these claims: “Christianity was influenced by myths of dying-and-rising saviors; therefore, the resurrection of Jesus must also be a myth.” Or, “The Noah flood story came from a society influenced by neighboring flood stories like that of Gilgamesh; therefore, the Noah flood story is a myth.”

These are (1) genetic, since they make conclusions based on origins, (2) unsubstantiated, since these claims will need lots of supporting evidence, and (3) fallacies. I would argue that these aren’t genetic fallacies, however. They fail in my mind because the unequivocal conclusion (“… must also be a myth”) can’t be drawn from evidence that simply points in that direction.

The fallacy vanishes when we make a conclusion that could follow from the evidence: “Christianity was influenced by myths of dying-and-rising saviors; therefore, we must consider that the resurrection of Jesus may also be a myth.” We still have work to do to establish that Christianity was influenced as claimed, but the fallacy is gone.

Related fallacies

The genetic fallacy is the term for any argument that points solely to origin as its evidence, but there are many subsets of the genetic fallacy based on the specific origin.

  • Ad hominem: attacking the person rather than the argument. “Senator Jones wants to raise taxes, but he beats his dog; therefore, raising taxes is a bad idea.”
  • Tu quoque: saying, in effect, “Oh yeah? Well you do, too!” This argument tries to respond to a problem by claiming that the other person suffers from it also.
  • Argument from authority fallacy: using someone as a relevant source when that person is not an authority in the field at hand or is biased.
  • Credential fallacy: rejecting an authority because that person doesn’t have the right degrees.
  • Ad feminam: rejecting an authority because that person is a woman.

And so on.

Avoid making thoughtless charges of these fallacies. Not every attack on a person is an ad hominem fallacy. “Just ignore that fire alarm; that’s nutty Mrs. Smith” may be a fallacy, but “Ignore that fire alarm; that’s Mrs. Smith, and she’s phoned in a false alarm every week for three years” isn’t. (It may not be the safest response for the fire department, but it’s not a logical fallacy.)

And as seen above, not every genetic (origins) argument is a fallacy.

The human race can’t quit stupid cold turkey.
— commenter Greg G.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/12/12.)

Photo credit: Simon Varwell