In 2004, James Dobson, arguably one of the most powerful evangelical leaders of the last century, said that letting gay people get married would lead to fathers marrying their daughters.
“How about group marriage?” he wrote in his book
Marriage Under Fire
. “Or marriage between daddies and little girls? Or marriage between a man and his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed.”
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The Equality Act is “just the beginning,” James Dobson cries. He also says that pop culture will take children on the path “to hell.”
Revisiting his book in 2005, he said on his Focus on the Family radio program: “Now, that’s more or less a prophecy. Not a divine prophecy, but a prediction.”
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In the years leading up to the Supreme Court’s
Obergefell v. Hodges
decision – the 2015 decision that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states – conservatives who opposed letting LGBTQ+ people get married were in the majority of public opinion, but they knew that they were losing ground. It was hard to think of objective reasons for others to oppose marriage equality, and people’s opinions about marriage rights were a proxy for how much they accepted the existence of LGBTQ+ people. As acceptance grew, their political power would diminish.
But that didn’t stop them from trying to argue that marriage rights would lead to all sorts of disastrous results, often with slippery slope arguments. That is, instead of arguing that two men or two women marrying is
in itself
unacceptable, they claimed that it would
lead
to something else that everyone could agree was unacceptable.
And often that something else was bestiality, abuse, or marriage between family members.
Dobson’s larger argument is that marriage was based on “a foundation of tradition, legal precedent, theology, and an overwhelming support of the people,” something that actually wasn’t true or stable throughout history.
He said that LGBTQ+ people were asking that marriage rights be based on concepts like “equal protection under the law” and “due process,” which, he said, could be applied to any situation. Since they were based on logic and reasoning, Dobson argued, people could use those concepts to logic and reason themselves into any position.
“After the introduction of marriage between homosexuals, however, it will be supported by nothing more substantial than the opinion of a single judge or by a black-robed panel of justices,” he wrote. “After they have reached that dubious decision, the family will consist of little more than someone’s interpretation of rights. Given that unstable legal climate, it is certain that some self-possessed judge somewhere will soon rule that three men, or three women, can marry. Or five men and two women. Or four and four. Who will be able to deny them that right?”
Of course, that hasn’t come to pass.
Obergefell
legalized marriage between two people of the same sex and… no state has legalized father/daughter marriage. No one is pushing to allow father/daughter marriage. There are no legal cases currently being heard to legalize father/daughter marriage.
This is because slippery slope arguments like Dobson’s only work for people who don’t understand what’s at stake. There exists a large group of people who want to marry people of the same sex for pretty much the same reasons that people want to marry someone of the opposite sex – to have children, to support their spouses, to have some stability and support for their conjugal relationships. There is no similar population of people who want the same thing between fathers and daughters.
It’s impossible to know whether Dobson was arguing in good faith, if he truly believed that allowing same-sex couples to marry would result in fathers marrying their daughters, in men marrying donkeys. If he did actually believe what he said, it’s only because he had a pretty poor understanding of how humans work.
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