The Fertility Straw Man

Gay marriage advocates continually bring up the "fertility strawman" or variations on it, falsely attributing to their detractors the premise that procreation is the governmental purpose and goal of marriage, and then try to show by using a proof by contradiction that the inconsistent fact that the non-procreating elderly, the unwilling or infertile couples who are also permitted to marry contradicts this premise. Thus, the premise that marriage is only about procreation as a governmental purpose and goal must be false, or why else would the government permit these to marry. The reasons for marriage, evidently for them, must lie elsewhere.

But no one has ever been making the argument that the purpose of marriage is to promote procreation.

Marriage does not exist as a means to accomplish the purpose and goal of government to promote and encourage procreation. It exists as a social and legal consequence of a fact of life and nature. It exists because procreation actually does takes place, that men and women actually do procreate. And as many courts have pointed out each time this strawman is brought up, marriage exists to manage the procreative relationship of men and women and its consequences.

Thus, to say that marriage is the social and legal consequence of this fact of life and nature is a statement of exemplary rationality.

There is no evidence that contradicts the idea that marriage is the social and legal consequence of procreation. All that gay marriage advocates are able to muster is a case of over-inclusiveness in the law, and then they apply an unrealistic legal standard to the marriage law that demands an utterly determined outcome of 100% reliability. With this they build their entire argument.

But gay marriage advocates are forever reluctant to answer the question: Where, or what, is that historic, social and legal institution that has been conceived to manage the utterly vital fact of procreation? Would they please identify it.

When they are not simply evading the question, amazingly their reluctant answer is as in the following:

From UbelievableFL

"There is no such institution to identify………"

or from Dyssonance

"It isn't marriage, never has been."

Or when pressed to reveal what the intent of marriage is if it isn't to manage procreation and its consequences, they respond that it is for "love". When pressed further to provide evidence of why the state would create an entire institution for relationships based only on love, they reply like this:

Re: Legal Definition of Marriage
by: paul33404 (53/M/The Palm Beaches, FL) 10/22/06 10:38 am
Msg: 6396 of 7492

"That's one I don't know how to answer. The 'state', where I live, doesn't have a "compelling reason" for anything. They are just the servants of the people. But for some reason, years and years ago, they created an entire institution for relationships based only on love."

This is, basically, their argument and their position from the most sophisticated of them to the most naive. They are only able to believe the way they do only so long as they flee from reality into the arms of delusion.

But this reveals something essentially troubling about their natures. Like flat-earth theorists and holocaust deniers, they are mired in their own dogmatic mythology and deviant vision of the world. There is a cult-like mentality among them that rejects both common sense and rational interpretation of history and law.

And then, the Sterile Couple Straw Man is simply a Two-Wrongs-Make-A-Right fallacy, and can be dismissed from the outset with a wave of the hand.