Misanthrope's Corner November 24, 1997

F L O R E N C E

K I N G

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

EXCEPT when insanity or America intervenes, there is no such thing as an illogical mind. The mind is by definition logical, as Socrates demonstrated when he took an illiterate slave boy and led him through the solution of a complex mathematical problem by asking him the proper questions in the proper sequence.
What a glorious moment it must have been for those present, one of those clean, sharp times when cold comfort is the best comfort of all. If I could travel back into the past and pick one historical event to witness first-hand, I would skip the legendary battles and boudoir intrigues for a front-row seat at this triumph of the reasoning process.
Socrates would have an even more edifying time-capsule experience if he and his slave boy could be fast-forwarded to our era to re-enact the demonstration for us.
He would discover that to Americans the point of it all is to make the slave boy ``feel good about himself.'' Everyone keeps saying this even though it conflicts with another incessant chant, ``It doesn't take a rocket scientist,'' a favorite of television blondes who utter it in tones of self-satisfied relief as they interview Socrates on the morning shows.
The home schoolers ask him for tips on how to do-it-yourself. The Bell Curvers insist on giving the slave boy an IQ test. The geneticists insist that he isn't really a slave boy. A well-shod Walter Coppage proclaims ``Socrates never walked here'' as he drags a barefoot kid through a Haitian open sewer in a new sponsorship ad. Child-abuse watchdogs try to put the slave boy in foster care, the American Psychological Association discovers Sudden Attention Concentration Disorder, and The Weekly Standard does ``The Slave-Boy Crack-Up.''
My interest in Socrates' demonstration of logic was triggered by a letter I received from a young man who described himself as a libertarian-conservative, Christian homosexual (he dislikes ``gay'' because it refers to a left-wing political agenda). That he is intelligent and well-educated is indisputable; his letter is a model of syntax, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary, but his reasoning is something else.
Taking issue with my column against same-sex marriage, he offered the following thoughts:
1. The argument that children are the primary purpose of marriage is negated by the fact that not all heterosexual couples intend to have children, yet are permitted to marry anyway, and to remain married despite their childlessness.
2. The argument that nothing prevents homosexuals from living together also applies to heterosexuals, so why do the latter need to marry?
3. How could homosexuals devalue marriage more than, say, Elizabeth Taylor?
4. Since marriage is an honorable estate instituted by God, and since God created us heterosexual and homosexual, He cannot have intended His blessing to be bestowed on some of His creatures and withheld from others.
5. The argument that homosexuals will marry solely to collect spousal benefits is negated by the age-old heterosexual custom of marrying for money. ``Keep in mind that, if we are going to prohibit homosexual marriages of convenience, logic obliges us to impose the same restriction on heterosexual marriages.''
6. ``Since homosexual marriage neither harms the rights of others nor does anything to diminish the public good, there is no compelling interest to forbid it.''
Fuzzy thinking yields easily to classic reasoning. Points one, two, and five are each a reductio ad absurdum; or, to paraphrase the Vietnam general, ``We had to destroy marriage to save it for homosexuals.'' Point three is an argumentum ad verecundiam, ``to the shameful,'' an argument based on an unworthy authority or example -- poor old Liz, who at least had three children along the way. Point four brings God into the reasoning process, thereby clouding the distinction between faith and knowledge made so abundantly clear in the old adage, ``A woman knows it's her child; a man can only have faith that it's his.'' And point six is a petitio principii, ``begging the question,'' an argument that asks us to accept the premise so that we can agree with the conclusion.
ALL well and good, but today's single-issue logicians are hostile to classic reasoning. The clean, sharp feeling of cold comfort cuts no ice with them if it threatens to blow away their perceived ``rights,'' and so, in the interest of greater security, they have invented American reasoning.
American reasoning arises from a molten pit of gluey psychodramas and steaming monomanias surging like blisters on the surface of cooked cereal. It invariably leads to the kind of disjointed, who-struck-John arguments heard on talk shows. Take, for example, the debate at my last public appearance. The question was why every society, even Nazi Germany, has been more tolerant of lesbianism than of male homosexuality.
``The lesbian sex drive has no effect on society,'' I said. ``A woman may be exclusively attracted to women and repelled by men, but she can still reproduce the species. All she has to do to conceive is be present, but if a man feels no desire for the female, conception won't occur and the race will die out.''
That's an argumentum ad equinam but horse sense has no place in American reasoning. I was attacked.
``You're saying women are passive!''
``You're emphasizing our differences instead of the ways we're alike.''
``Do you want to force lesbians to bear children?''
The best was the woman who kept asking ominously, ``Suppose you substituted the word 'black' . . . ?'' I wish I could have heard the rest of her pinch-hitting strategy but she was drowned out in the uproar. How my remarks about the lesbian sex drive could be transferred to blacks is one of the mysteries of the universe, but the argumentum ad africanum is such a cornerstone of American reasoning that as soon as she heard the word ``race,'' out it came.