Piling on the Santorum

I must admit, I do enjoy writing about former Pennsylvania Senator and presidential candidate Rick Santorum. He seems so obsessed with the sex lives of other people and he is a great source of logical fallacies and terrible arguments. Witness the following video:


(the link to the vid)

The fallacy I want to focus on in this video is False Analogy. Before getting to the fallacy, I should quickly say that an analogy is a comparison between two things, one well-understood, one less so. The point of an analogy is to aid in comprehension of the less well known thing by comparing it to something that is more familiar or understandable. In practice analogies can often be tricky because  there can often be as many similarities as dissimilarities between the terms of the comparison. Nevertheless, there are clear instances when a fallacy goes awry, and this is the False Analogy: an analogy in which the comparison isn't really apt or appropriate.

In the clip above Santorum makes the following analogy: calling a same sex-union marriage is equivalent to calling a napkin a paper towel in that a napkin has certain metaphysical or ontological properties that make the label 'paper towel' incorrect in the same way that marriage has certain metaphysical or ontological properties that make allowing same-sex couples or polygamous/polyandrous groupings incorrect (I think I reconstructed that accurately, Santorum is not the clearest speaker in the world, and he seems to be speaking extemporaneously in the video).

Putting aside Santorum's shaky grasp of metaphysics, it should be pretty clear why this is a bad analogy. In particular, the case of a physical object and a societal contract are very different. Despite Santorum's claim that marriage predates civilization, it should be obvious to any clear-thinking person that marriage (particularly the kind that is sanctioned by the state, which is what these debates are about) is ultimately a contract, and contracts don't exist without a society and some sort of legal or cultural framework for the enforcement of those contracts. In addition, societies set rules regarding what kinds of contracts are and aren't legitimate as well as who is allowed to enter into a contract. In the US, for example, one can't enforce a contract that sells one person into slavery. Even if one were to draw up a piece of paper with legal sounding language spelling out the terms of the arrangement and both parties signed and were notarized, this contract would be considered null and void because one isn't allowed to make that kind of contract in the US. Similarly, in many states one can't enforce a marriage contract between members of the same-sex. In either case, there is no ontological or metaphysical component to these contracts, they are merely conventions adopted by particular societies, and as with any social convention society can decide to change or modify it. Prior to the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virgina in 1967 it was illegal in many states for a black person to marry a white person of the opposite sex. In that decision the Supreme Court redefined the legal conventions around marriage making such unions legitimate. Again, marriage is nothing more than what states or societies define it to be. It is this important difference between social conventions and physical objects that renders Santorum's argument a False Analogy.