Gay Marriage
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When Aristotle discussed the material premises of enthymemes as being important in rhetoric, he was prescient of the kind of appeals that would be tendered by opponents in the discourse over gay rights issues long after his time. Smith and Windes express the nature of this conflict accurately when they write, “symbols expressing fundamental cultural values are invoked by all sides” (1997: 28). Similarly, Sarah S. Brown describes the participants in a “struggle to stake out symbolic positions of good and to frame their side in terms of morally powerful conceptions of right and wrong” (2000: 458). Fascinatingly, she suggests, “even people with deeply conflicting opinions appeal to the same moral concepts for the force of their arguments” (458). In fact, these same moral concepts are ubiquitous to all discourse and to life. They penetrate the social order at the most fundamental level. They are not static, however, and their malleability gives rise to a constantly shifting landscape of debate wherein, as Smith and Windes (1997) assert, the adversaries literally have so much impact as to drive the process of self-definition for one another.
Related to that process is the way in which the landscape itself is defined, which Haider-Markel and Meier see as consequential in terms of “what resources are important and [what] advantages some coalitions [in the struggle] have over others” (1996: 346). (See also: Kintz, 1998; Smith and Windes, 1997). Particularly, they demonstrate that models of discourse which conceptualize gay issues in terms of morality (or culture) as opposed to politics or civil rights offer a rhetorical upper hand to proponents of anti-gay arguments. It is the objective of this paper to explore that edge and to deal with prescriptions that have been suggested as remedies for it. To begin with, however, we turn back to enthymemes.
Terrence Cook (1980) identifies eight categories of standards that are referred to in the justification of political appeals – prudence, tradition, the supernatural, (human) nature, law, public opinion, prestige suggestion, and ideals. He writes, “Sometimes standards are implicit in myths or metaphors, symbolizations which are more than decoration when they tap through concretization of otherwise cold cognitions” (516). In fact, he may be referring to the power of fundamental, (almost) universally accepted principles that are woven into the constitutive myths and stories of social realities. Only tacit allusion to these principles is required to trigger them within an audience and engage that audience in their own persuasion.
Certainly, this is the phenomenon that Brown (2000) encounters when she notices how opposing factions of the debate surrounding same-sex parenting each make claim to the same value-laden concepts in their arguments. For example, both “pros” and “cons” reference the utmost importance of family, believe that human rights are indispensable, and share “a conception of prejudice as irrational and unjustified opposition to something, even using the same words to describe it: hateful, judgmental, ignorant” (449). The substance of their arguments, then, consists of each party attempting to load this “shared moral language” with definitional information that favors their opinion. Thus, it is not necessary to emphasize the familys value to society, but it does become important for each side of the debate to characterize the family in a way that protects their respective discursive interests. Consequently, for example, anti-gay arguments define the family in terms of a heterosexual man and a heterosexual woman with children, whereas pro-gay arguments might define the family in terms of love.
Enthymematic arguments also play a very significant role in shaping the process described by Smith and Windes whereby:
On the one side, progay self-representation is pushed by antigay depiction toward ethnic identity and non-erotic self-presentation and away from an understanding of gay behavior as merely a choice of erotic style. On the other, anti-gay self-representation is forced by progay depiction toward civility and secular government and away from vituperative denunciation and moral appeals. (1997: 31)
In other words, discourse over gay issues literally shapes the manner in which the opponents define not only each other, but themselves, through this process: First, one interpretive community – lets use, for example, the antigay camp – makes a claim, which is rationalized by invoking some popularly held standard or set of standards and rendering said standard(s) into an inductive proposition, which is subsequently transformed into an enthymeme by leaving the obvious foundations of the argument out of it. For example, anti-gay reasoning might appeal to the standards of nature and the supernatural to manufacture grounds against homosexuality, arguing that heterosexual behavior has an exclusive and divinely ordained claim to legitimacy based on the fact that only heterosexual sex can lead to procreation. In this instance, the material premises of the argument are constituted, at least in part, by presuppositions that God exists and that Gods law is expressed in nature, that equate the notion of natural/legitimate with either the notion of required for reproduction or occurs most commonly, and that, as Jennifer Terry eloquently puts it, “conceptualize sexuality narrowly in terms of the evolutionary imperative of reproduction” (2000: 154).
At this point, the ball is in the pro-gay court. For the time being, it matters not whether pro-gay argumentation will, in our hypothetical case, isolate the material premises of the syllogism that we have just unpacked and question their validity – more about that later. But rather, Smith and Windes draw attention to a common rhetorical strategy that is not related directly to the line of argument put forth by the opposing team (and which, I think, is often the more obtainable method of parrying attacks), involving the deflection or invalidation of their arguments by constructing their identity as unpropitious because of their position in the discourse. This strategy is carried out using enthymemes as well. For example, in response to the Gods Law/Natural Law argument, pro-gay dialogues have characterized anti-gay advocates as people who “subvert political order by injecting religion into politics,” and attempt to “write evangelical views into public policy” (1997: 33). The pro-gay assertion, which relies upon the material premise of the good of autonomous self-determination, thus portrays anti-gay identity as a theocratic threat to a free democratic society.