In just another case of how liberals and secularists attempt to evade logic and reason using appeals to emotion and pity, a recent columnist “argues” for gay marriage by telling a tale of misery and despair. A tactic for many other untenable (and unpopular) liberal positions, here we find one more illogical and unreasonable (and therefore dishonest) appeal.

The whiny yarn came from Leonard Pitts, guest columnist in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and promotes a typical liberal non-argument that derives all of its persuasive strength from the pity generated by an anecdote. Pitts begins by describing a typical family, only constructing the story so that reader plays the assumed husband’s role, vacationing with his wife and kids on a cruise ship. Suddenly mommy falls ill and the scene transfers to a hospital room. Anxiously awaiting news of his wife’s condition, he paces the halls periodically getting stalled by doctors. Finally, he reaches her bedside only to watch a priest administer last rights as she dies. Then come two shocking twists: this story really happened on Feb. 18–19, 2007, in Miami, and the anxious husband was not a husband, but a lesbian lover.

Notice how merely by the way the writer constructs the argument—placing the sympathetic reader in the midst of it with certain traditional assumptions in place—he succeeds in building the emotional power he needs to pull off the intellectual scam. Then, once the reader’s emotion naturally engages the assumed traditional couple, the writer completes the heist, switching the gender of the “husband,” and thus stealing the legitimate pathos for an illegitimate cause.

This bait-and-switch merely begins the author’s irrelevant appeal to pity. He writes,

Politicians and alleged religious leaders have routinely invited us to hate gay people and call it morality. They have taught us to frame gay lives in cloudy abstracts of tradition and values. But this isn’t abstract, is it?[1]

Then he really pours it on: 

No, it’s Janice and Lisa, meeting in college and falling in love, 20 years ago. It is a “holy union” service in a local church,… “We were dirt poor … but we pulled it off.”

It is taking in foster kids no one else wants, drug babies, HIV babies, babies with fetal alcohol syndrome. It is adopting four of them and Lisa deciding she wants to be a stay-at-home mom and Janice saying OK, and wondering how the six of them will manage on a social worker’s salary.

It is Janice, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and Lisa, bashful Lisa, becoming the family extrovert, cheerful the kids at “toddler tumbling time,” shepherding them to swimming lessons and story time at the library.

It is Lisa, who loved pecan sandies, the movie “Beaches,” and Mitch Album’s book “Tuesdays withMorrie,” stricken by an aneurysm. It is Lisa, for eight hours, dying alone. It would be good if someone remembered her next time we are invited to hate an abstract. And remember Janice, who could not ache more deeply even if her name was Joe.[2]

First of all I must note the irony of someone who supports gay marriage and yet still feels compelled to put the phrase “holy union” in quotation marks. You see, deep down these perverts know that gay “marriage” is a perversion which can only exist in by aping real, legitimate holy unions. Of course, the full truth is much worse. God does not honor gay “marriages,” and thus they are neither “holy” nor “unions.”

Where in any of his little soap opera did Mr. Pitts approach a substantial argument? Well, in fairness we should note that he consciously used the appeal to pity in order to make us aware of the fact that not legalizing gay marriage does in fact have real life consequences. This he promotes against “politicians and alleged religious leaders” who have “routinely invited us to hate gay people” and “frame gay lives in cloudy abstracts of tradition and values.” And exactly what politician or religious leader has actually invited you to hate gay people? The reader can easily see that the heart of this argument is a straw man, weakly mocking as “hate” the conservative (and vast majority) platform that opposes legalizing gay marriage. In Mr. Pitts’ world, opposition gets labeled “hate,” and “values”—at least values he doesn’t agree with!—are “cloudy” and “abstract.” With such a weak caricature of the real conservative position, the straw man stands out.

Likewise, loaded words such as “hate,” etc., merely apply epithets to the situation when Pitts should be trying to prove his case through argument. So, additionally, Pitts begs the question. Instead of presenting an argument to prove that traditional marriage values (and laws) are wrong, he assumes this, and then tells his story based on that assumption, and in such a way as to pull your heart strings while stalling your mental gears. Like so many liberal media voices, Pitts does not try to gain your intellectual assent and then watch your behavior change based on conversion; no, he wishes to bypass reasoning by melting your heart and then pouring it into the mold of his choice.

But is it even true, for example, that opposing gay marriage invites us to hate an “abstraction”? Do conservative and religious believers who promote real marriage speak only in vague generalities and ignore real-life consequences? After all, this Janice and Lisa story really happened, and Janice and the kids ended up really sorrowful. How can conservatives compete with that?

Here we encounter one of the problems with emotional persuasion: it stifles thinking, and it even stifles thinking outside the box of the narrow issue they apply it to. What I mean is this: simply apply the same standard to the opposite side (or any other story) and you can “prove” just as much. For example, the reason that most HIV babies exist to begin with stems directly back to the profligate and perverted lifestyles similar to that of the LGBT movements. How did the mother contract the disease anyway? To be sure, some few may be innocent, but Lisa and Janice cannot avoid the fact that the very perversion they engage in is a near relative of the kind that spreads AIDS and ultimately produced the unfortunate cases of HIV infants. In short, part of the pitiful situation they leverage arises because of the very lifestyle they use that pity to defend. Anti-family is as anti-family does. And the HIV issue is but one example.

So look here, Mr. Pitts, bashful Lisa and sad Janice may make a tear-jerking story, but that does not mean they’re not complicit in degrading and destroying society as well.

Of course, all of this profuse pity has absolutely no logical relevance to the question of whether or not we should legalize homosexual marriage. That behavior is either right or wrong, and whether or not we feel good about it, Biblical and traditional values (both real and abstract) reject the notion as either good or beneficial before God or society. Since when did emotions prove logical direction and moral wisdom? Since when did someone merely feeling bad about a situation legitimize their agenda? Some murderers feel bad, not for murdering, but for getting caught and punished. Should we therefore relax the laws and punishments against murder because criminals languish and suffer in prisons and death rows? No? But what if that murderer had adopted four HIV babies and loved eating pecan cookies? Now don’t be blinded by all those alleged religious leaders who preach against murder; they’re just promoting another abstract and cloudy tradition!

Once you dispense of the Straw Man, and the Epithet, Pitts has nothing left but a sad story and a bucket-load of pity. He Appeals to it very strongly. Granted, the story does involve the truly sad story of a lover who has invested much of her life and emotion into another person, but strong feelings do not indicate logical entailment. The truth does not hinge on whether the story is sad or not; it hinges on whether the relationship at the base of it is ultimately legitimate or not. The story can be sad and the relationship illegitimate at the same time.

The Appeal to Pity has emerged as a favorite tactic of modern liberals. Conservative columnist Ann Coulter explains with characteristic acumen:

[T]he Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we’re not allowed to reply to. That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can’t respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering. Liberals haven’t changed the message, just the messenger. All the most prominent liberal spokesmen are people with “absolute moral authority”—Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, a terminal illness.… Liberals prey on people at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability and offer them fame and fortune to be that month’s purveyor of hate. Victory goes to the most hysterical.…

[O]ver the last few years the Democrats have used:

• a grieving Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was murdered by a lunatic on the Long Island Rail Road, to lobby for gun control
• a paralyzed, dying Christopher Reeve to argue for embryonic stem-cell research
• a gaggle of weeping widows to blame [then] President Bush for 9/11
• a disabled Vietnam veteran, Max Cleland, to attack the Iraq war and call Bush, Cheney, and every other human who ever disagreed with him a “chicken hawk”
• a rare Democratic Purple Heart recipient, Congressman John Murtha, to argue for surrender in Iraq.…[3]

Similarly, “Former New Republic editor and gay marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan brandished the openly gay chaplain to New York City’s firemen, who himself died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, in his ongoing, nonstop argument for gay priests. The chaplain died on 9/11, therefore the Pope should back off.”[4] Coulter exposes the faulty logic behind Appeals to Pity, and what she explains also applies to Mr. Pitts’ pitiful story above. Peeling away all the layers of emotion involved, Pitts’ argument amounts to this: “Janice’s lesbian lover died, Janice felt bad about it, and therefore we should legalize gay marriage.”

Liberals (and others) who have no winning substance to their arguments love to resort to emotional appeals, and the more pitiful the case they can present, the more their opposition will look heartless for merely questioning them. But good judgment, questioning, and critical thinking should make up the true heart of social policy and legislation. Injecting emotions into the issue reduces both the possibility and effectiveness of reasoned discourse, and thus damages the effort of arriving at truth and justice. Squelching these virtues with appeals to pity indicates greater concern for a personal agenda than for truth.

To Appeal to Lisa’s plight and Janice’s “ache,” then, commits a fallacy that the wise reader will weed out when assessing the real argument. We should reject and discard any such arguments that attempt to persuade by pity or emotions rather than truth. They do not represent good ethics or reasoning. In short, when it comes to logic, the pitiful argument for gay marriage is, well, in the Pitts.

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