Friday, November 20, 2009

Sex Integration Fail: Take Two

Previously, I took an article written by our anti-equality friend On Lawn to to task for asserting that same-sex marriage is a "pollution of equality" and that it was heterosexual marriage that caused women to win the right to vote in the US. I raised a number of very clear questions in my piece, questions that any able "marriage defender" and "gender complementarist" should have had no trouble answering.

Unfortunately, I found On Lawn's response to be inarticulate, unresponsive, and a failure in answering the questions I raised with respect to his own argumentation. I find it very problematic when people are unable to coherently articulate the reasons behind their beliefs, especially when they are strongly-held beliefs affecting my rights.

For one, he couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he was responding to my article or to Seda's comments, who ventured to On Lawn's blog to engage him on the issue. Such a confused, muddled response to both Seda and me is bizarre and not indicative of clear thought. Two, throughout the post, On Lawn pumps his fists in victory without providing sentences or clauses clearly articulating his argumentation. He writes as though his conclusions speak for themselves as being self-evidently true and require no elaboration. While that sort of writing is "convincing" to those with ESP, it leaves the rest of us mere muggles unconvinced.

Third, once On Lawn began talking substance, he seemed to not even understand his own original argument. His original argument, if you will remember, was that the integration of the sexes within heterosexual marriage caused women to win the right to vote in the US. According to him, wives persuaded their husbands to give women the right to vote, and that marriage, therefore, was the biggest "conduit" to power for women. In my response, I had provided a study that demonstrated that On Lawn had the causal relationship wrong. Namely, it was single men in the West who granted women the right to vote, not because they were persuaded by their wives (which being single men they of course did not have), but because they (a) were not threatened by the relatively few numbers of female voters and (b) they wanted to attract potential wives.

This was a rather obvious, if not boring, point. Yet, finding something, although what is not entirely clear, oh so hilarious, On Lawn chortles:

"Even more funny is how Fannie provides the quote from this article to her readership. Given that I find marriage as a conduit for women to persuade men for equality,"


With that awkward transition, he then provides a quote from the study I presented:

"With women being a scarcity, the net benefit of adopting woman suffrage carried lower potential costs to men in terms of risks and devaluation of their political influence; and for legislators in the West, woman suffrage had the added benefit of potentially attracting female settlers."


Like I said. Male settlers granted women the right to vote before they were married to women, not after, as On Lawn had originally argued. The magical aspect of "sex integration" had not yet occurred when men decided to grant women the right to vote. Oddly, On Lawn interprets this paragraph as supporting his original argument. Ejaculating his undeserved victory, he ponders:

"I wonder if Fannie misses out on the power of male-female integration in marriage mentioned directly in that quote."


He fails to comprehend that the evidence demonstrates pretty much the exact opposite of his own argument. Yet, cackling away like a madman, he pretends that it perfectly supports it.

One wonders, why doesn't he just concede this? Why not acknowledge that he re-invented history to support his "marriage defense" agenda? Worse things have happened in the world than Being Wrong On the Internet. Is one's "defense" of marriage so precarious that one tiny concession would cause a host of other "self-evident truths" to come tumbling down?

Why am I still even talking about this non-point? Why, when I point out flaws such as this, does On Lawn resort to calling me an obsessive stalker? Tune in tomorrow, where we ponder the answers to those questions.

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