r e a l r e v i e w . i e

Ah, just when you thought it had gone away, suddenly we’re talking about the Civil Partnership Bill again. I’m fairly sure that merits of the Civil Partnership Bill had already been discussed to death, and frankly I wasn’t particularly interested the first time round-

…okay, that needs elaboration. Obviously, the Bill is important, and obviously it doesn’t go far enough. However, I don’t / didn’t really feel the need to say anything beyond “great, pass it, then drive on for full equality*.” People who argue that it should be opposed because it doesn’t recognise the rights of gay families vis-a-vis their children – well this is obviously a fair position, but it does smack of refusing half a cake because you want the whole thing.

As for those who claim that gay couples shouldn’t get the same rights afforded to heterosexual couples… bluntly, the only way I see anyone making a consistent argument on this basis is if it’s based on: -

a: the belief that homosexuality is wrong or evil, and

b: the belief that an individual’s idea of private morality can or should be imposed on the entire population.

So I’m not sure I even have to go to the bother of stating the obvious here, but anyone who can accept those two axioms can just Fuck Right Off.

The only reason to linger on this, then, is that there are attempts to paint these arguments as non-judgemental and empirical. The Frontline had a programme about “the family” on Monday night, which quickly became about the Civil Partnership Bill and, even more quickly, about a gay couple’s right to adopt. ‘Course, the Frontline has “discussions” on all sorts of blindingly obvious questions, if you can class “unrepresentative groups of extremists shouting slogans at each other” as “discussion”; this, however, was different. David Quinn was on it.

Quinn… bothers me. He’s able to coat his obnoxious rhetoric in a varnish of spurious reason; last night, his arguments were full of words like “evidence-based”, giving the notion that his views are neutral rather than desperately prejudiced. The Frontline is generally full of ignorant backbenchers spouting gibberish, of which there was a top-notch example last night – stand up Jim Walsh, the new poster-child for Stupidity In A Suit – but Quinn is different. Bluntly, he’s a slick operator, and that makes him… well, dangerous is too melodramatic a word, but he’s certainly worrying. Ivana Bacik failed to land a serious punch on him, and that’s not a good thing*. Particularly since Quinn’s techniques are, uniformly, nonsensical.

Here’s a smattering of his quotes. Have fun.

“One in four kids is not being raised by their true married parents. The logic of the family diversity point of view is that it doesn’t really matter if that number climbs to fifty percent or sixty or seventy percent, that we shouldn’t really mind if ever more children don’t have the benefit of their own two married parents.”

“Are you indifferent to whether kids get raised by their mother or father? …The implication of your position is that it doesn’t matter if you’re raised by your own mother and father… that it doesn’t matter if a child is raised by the two people who bring them into the world.”

“Some people want to nullify and write out of the social script the idea that it is ideal to have a mother and father… and to condemn the notion that a child should have a mother and father as bigotry, so basically everybody watching this programme tonight who believes in traditional morality and a child’s right to a mother and father is a bigot, and increasingly the law is going to be brought against them… that was just what was said.”

“You must recognise [a] child’s right to be raised by a mother and father who are going to love them. If you have a lesbian couple and a heterosexual couple, both there to adopt the child, I would have thought that if you were looking at it from the child’s point of view, you must give the child to the loving mother and father… otherwise what you’re saying is that the child doesn’t have a right to be raised by a mother and father.”

All those statements are utter horseshit for a variety of reasons, but what’s most interesting is what they have in common. All the above are based on extrapolation – taking an argument and extending it to breaking point, then using the extremes to discredit the argument in the first place. So, if your reasoned opinion is that a gay couple should have equal rights to a same-sex couple, then by extension you think that anyone who believes a child should be entitled to stay with their birth parents is a bigot. It’s a brand of reductio ad absurdum, if you like. Note the words used above – “the logic of this point of view,” “the implication of your position.”

There’s a vague sheen of rigour here (reduction ad absurdum is how the drafting of legislation is tested, and it does require a form of logical thinking) that might seem persuasive to stupid people. Subtly, it also implies that every move towards equality is part of a creeping, wider agenda – this equality thing might start with Civil Partnership, but it ends with mothers and fathers have no rights over their children. Incrementally, if you accept that every move made is part of an agenda to fashion the world in anothers’ image (and, if you’re David Quinn, you might genuinely think this way), each step is quite logical. Marriage is important, and it’s between a woman and a man. Therefore, recognising other forms of relationship in any way makes marriage less important; therefore, it’s an attack on marriage; therefore it’s an attack on the relationship of a woman and a man; and so on, until Dem Gays are stealing kids away from their mother and father, and straight kids are being tortured on pink crosses.

This argument-by-twelve-step-syllogism is a particularly adolescent form of discussion. When we’re young, and trying to figure out a system of ethics while full of contradictory hormones, we tend to do this – leastways, I know I did, god help me. Take as few basic principles as possible, systematically apply them to all ethical questions, and then smile smugly at how intellectual you are. Sooner or later, most of us realise that this doesn’t work – perfect solutions require perfect societies, and we don’t live in one of those. So we legislate differently in different circumstances, we apply whatever principles seems fairest for the case in question.

(What’s remarkable about Quinn’s tirades, in this instance, is that they’re based on an entirely false premise – what all LGBT groups are after is equality, and “denying the child a right to their mother and father” is nothing to do with equality. Equality is the endgame, not a stepping stone to some totalitarian gay state. If you entirely accept that a child is always best off with its birth parents it makes no difference at all, since children being put up for adoption either don’t have living parents, or have been given up for a variety reasons.  “Mother” and “father” don’t come into it; there is no “mother” and “father” in the only cases that matter. Accepting that a random gay couple can do as good a job with those children as a random straight couple is the conclusion of the process. Not that I’ve ever met David Quinn in my life, but I can’t but it feels like we’re looking at a man who doesn’t realise how skewed his views are – he wants to be tolerant, but finds gay people a bit wuuuh, and has post-rationalised some spurious reason around his knee-jerk reaction.)

Dogmatists are essentially people who never leave the one-size fits all mindset behind, and that’s why they’re so uniformly boring. A mature person recognises that the big social questions – individualism v collectivism, say – are an ongoing debate, a balancing act, and tries to mediate between the two. A dogmatist decides they’re on one side or the other, and then systematically applies the logic of their position everywhere; interestingly, they also assume that everyone else shares their thought processes – therefore it’s natural to a dogmatist to conduct argument by extrapolation. To borrow from Alan Bleasdale, they’re people who’ve only read one book.

(There’s a clear if trivial example here, from one of Ireland’s right-wing bores bloggers, John McGuirk, where he claims that asking the HSE to avoid gender stereotyping is the same as** vilifying parents who let their daugher wear pink or that noting the unhealthy consequences of advertising is actually identifying a “sinister plot.”)

This is just… fucking moronic. It’s the same technique as saying that anyone who supports the NHS is a Marxist, or that anyone who claims to love their country is a Nazi, and it’s only marginally more sophisticated. What it is, in fact, is a variation on the “where do you draw the line?” argument, and the answer is cock-obvious to anyone who doesn’t come from a dogmatic mindset; you draw the line at the appropriate point. That’s why we have laws, and judges, and even politicians. Line-drawing is what our body of legislature is set up to do.

The outcomes are important, but I tend to find the tone of discussion more interesting than whether legislation gets passed or not, and I suspect I have a reason for this; there’s always another argument coming up about some other new law or budget or public lynching, and the most important new development is always the next one. The problem isn’t that people come up with Quinn’s brand of tripe – there are always going to be arseholes in the world – it’s that they’re allowed to say it without a serious challenge. Quinn is a grubby little man, a smooth-talking mass of nonsense glistening with false logic and irrelevant facts. He managed to look vaguely reasonable on Monday night, and for all the crapness of The Frontline’s format, it isn’t Fox News – it is ultimately a programme that at least pretends to be balanced, even if its the same form of “balance” you get when two equally fat blokes jump up and down at either end of a see-saw. There was a single grain of truth in Quinn’s arguments; “progessives”, for want of a better word, have grown so used to the central tenets of tolerance and equality that, when challenged, they tend to resort to name-calling and taunts of bigotry. This is understandable, but it’s sometimes necessary to engage with reactionaries on their own pseudo-logical ground – if we don’t, then Quinn and his ilk can maintain the illusion of reason, crushed by the bias of the establishment. Maybe he is a bigot, but more importantly, he’s an idiot – a man whose logic is terminally warped. If even that can’t be exposed, then those of us who value equality and fairness will never win any of the important arguments at all.

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