Fancy Store-Bought Dirt

Checking in on Savage Love

This column is mostly dead-on but near the end it contains one of the worst arguments I've ever heard for refraining from moral judgment:

Fourth, Inky and Pinky and Blinky and Clyde have all made it clear that they think it's wrong for people who drive green cars to tailgate. Would someone in the media please ask them the obvious follow-up question: How the fuck do they propose to stop people who drive green cars from tailgating? Post two members of the National Guard on the front bumper of every green car in the country? Forced defensive driving courses at car lots? Mandatory ignition shut-off for everyone who does manage to tailgate in a green car?

Wait, no, that's not the real quote, just an absurd form of his generic argument. The actual quote is here and it's really not argument so much as vitriol. Maybe even beginning to take vitriol seriously is a mistake, but enough people take Dan Savage's rants (as well as his cogent arguments) seriously that it's worth pointing out silly leaps of logic.

In any case, does everyone agree that "How hard would it be to stop this act?" isn't terribly relevant to whether the act is worthy of moral condemnation? (If you disagree with that general claim then compare it to the cliche about whether "Might makes right.")

Two asides that are also irrelevant, though it's possible that a reader would mistakenly think of them as relevant:
1. If there were some reason to reduce lesbian pregnancies, the easiest way to accomplish that would probably be to prohibit artificial insemination. That would be unwise but it would be feasible.

2. I have no objection myself to same-sex child rearing. My gut feeling is that the ideal configuration of parents includes at least one man and at least one woman. I suspect that two parental figures is better than 3+, if only to cut down on confusion. (At some point a hierarchy would evolve. Once that happens, the secondaries aren't really "parents" so much as "aunts" and/or "uncles.") On the other hand I'm almost dead certain that children are, in general, significantly better off with two parents than with one or fewer. (Aside from the inherent frivolity of railing against a fictional character, Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown.) As for the possible two-parent combinations, I suspect "man + woman" > "woman + woman" > "man + man" but even if so, the differences are too small to draw any universal conclusions.