Let This Post Act as a Primer On Shooting Down Any Argument Against Marriage Equality

The arguments against marriage equality are so filled with loopholes, it’s surprising that videos from Queerty favorite Rob Tisinai shooting down the myths are able to make things even more black and white. But if you’ve got 10 minutes, Rob’s new clip is an excellent pairing with Jonathan Chait’s piece in The New Republic, which he brands “The definitive case against gay marriage critics.” The only fault in either of their arguments, perhaps, is focusing too much on Carrie Prejean, who unfortunately (or fortunately for us?) has become a face of the gay marriage debate. But then we’re just nitpickers.

One of our new favorite ways to reframe a rebuttal, courtesy Chait:

In a liberal society, consenting adults are presumed to be able to do as they like, and it is incumbent upon opponents of any such freedom to demonstrate some wider harm. The National Organization for Marriage, on its website, instructs its activists to answer the who-gets-harmed query like so: “Who gets harmed? The people of this state who lose our right to define marriage as the union of husband and wife, that’s who.” Former GOP Senator Rick Santorum, arguing along similar lines, has said, “[I]f anybody can get married for any reason, then it loses its special place.”

Both these arguments rest upon simple tautologies. Expanding a right to a new group deprives the rest of us of our right to deny that right to others. If making a right less exclusive devalues it, then any extension of rights is an imposition upon those who were not previously excluded–i.e., women’s suffrage makes voting less special for men.

And this nugget from Tisani, refuting down the ridiculous premise that same-sex marriage leads to human-animal marriage (a theory pedaled by brilliant minds like Maggie Gallagher and Bill O’Reilly): “A goat would be more likely to eat a marriage license than to sign one.”