Published: Saturday, November 21, 2009
MARRIAGE
Dismiss faith, logic at our great peril
Regarding the Monday letter, “We confuse faith and logic at our peril”: The writer seeks to diminish religious belief by saying it is contrary to logic. Yet, as a Lutheran pastor, I accept and use logic. And I challenge the letter’s logic.
The writer charges the wrong people with failing to use logic when it comes to marriage. The fallacy of exclusion, which advances a position by means of ignoring inconvenient truths, is a prominent tactic in the pro-gay marriage agenda. But is it credible to pretend that there is no other intellectual side to this debate?
It is for their own reasons that homosexuals will not marry a person of the opposite sex even though they are legally free to do so. Therefore, by what logical grounds should they expect the time-honored definition of marriage to change for them?
Why are the protectors of marriage labeled the “extremists” instead of those who choose to overthrow the entire history of marriage?
The most frequently leveled challenge to conservatives is, “How will homosexual marriage harm your marriage?” But this commits the logical fallacy of the “straw man” since virtually no conservative claims that existing marriages are harmed. It is not our marriages that are harmed, but our children who would inherit a radically altered vision of the family and sexuality.
Will it be insisted in our public schools, against the will of parents, that there is no norm in marriage? This is not an empty concern since recent history demonstrates that this trend is real. The burden of proof for answering this question lies with the proponents of homosexual marriage who have a track record of demanding more and more approval all the way to their present insistence on the very re-definition of marriage.
In the face of these challenges, the kind of serious logic that exposes the absurdity of much of popular culture is all the more urgent.
Gary Jensen
Snohomish
The writer charges the wrong people with failing to use logic when it comes to marriage. The fallacy of exclusion, which advances a position by means of ignoring inconvenient truths, is a prominent tactic in the pro-gay marriage agenda. But is it credible to pretend that there is no other intellectual side to this debate?
It is for their own reasons that homosexuals will not marry a person of the opposite sex even though they are legally free to do so. Therefore, by what logical grounds should they expect the time-honored definition of marriage to change for them?
Why are the protectors of marriage labeled the “extremists” instead of those who choose to overthrow the entire history of marriage?
The most frequently leveled challenge to conservatives is, “How will homosexual marriage harm your marriage?” But this commits the logical fallacy of the “straw man” since virtually no conservative claims that existing marriages are harmed. It is not our marriages that are harmed, but our children who would inherit a radically altered vision of the family and sexuality.
Will it be insisted in our public schools, against the will of parents, that there is no norm in marriage? This is not an empty concern since recent history demonstrates that this trend is real. The burden of proof for answering this question lies with the proponents of homosexual marriage who have a track record of demanding more and more approval all the way to their present insistence on the very re-definition of marriage.
In the face of these challenges, the kind of serious logic that exposes the absurdity of much of popular culture is all the more urgent.
Gary Jensen
Snohomish
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