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I don’t find that line of reasoning very convincing. If the religious critics were right, it was in a stopped-clock sense.
Here are some circa-2010 objections, mostly on theological grounds. Either it’s a sin or it’s not. Either the denomination can extend rites to unrepentant sinners, or it can not. Lots of link rot, but in the statements I could access, churches weren’t justifying based on a slippery slope.
Here and here we have articles debating the slippery slope, but it’s towards polygamy. That’s a more credible threat than this 2004 scare story about horse marriage, though it’s more a vehicle for delivering the full slate of polygamy, social consensus, and “think of the children” arguments.
Transgender politics wasn’t in the Overton window at this point. It still wasn’t as of 2012, from what I see. Which makes sense—their issue isn’t marriage, or even equal rights. The current debate over social acceptability is categorically different.
I’m left with an impression that churches had their theological debates. The secular public backed those up with arguments like the slippery slope against polygamy. Nobody talked about the tiny, weird minority within the minority. But once that group gained traction, pattern matching kicked in, and suddenly this was the next step of the slippery slope. I don’t buy it.
The religious types told me that the LGBT squad wouldn't be content to just win and go sit down, but rather would return with a new set of worse and disgusting demands. They were correct. Pointing out that they didn't guess the exact flavor correctly isn't that interesting to me.
I don't need you to "buy it", I'm just telling you why I will absolutely never give the LGBT movement another inch under any circumstances.
And that proves way, way too much. It applies just as well to anything you already find unsavory. “My outgroup will demand something disgusting” is a heuristic that almost always works.
Except the LGBT movement wasn't part of my outgroup at first, the religious weirdoes bitching about it were. That outgroup predicted that the LGBT movement would escalate with a series of increasingly unreasonable and disgusting demands, and sure enough here we are.
So no, I didn't apply a heuristic of "my outgroup will demand something disgusting" whatsoever. Rather a movement that was at first nominally part of my ingroup started demanding to teach queer theory to kindergarteners and keep children's "gender transitions" secret from their parents.
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Have they won? Gay marriage in the US only holds due to a Supreme Court ruling. Which is able to be overturned much as we saw with abortion at any time. It is very precarious. As I pointed out, in the UK where gay marriage was legally put in law by a Conservative prime minister and thus is much better protected, the trans movement does in fact seem to have lost allies and steam.
If they haven't actually won then complaining they didn't sit down after winning is missing the point.
There were court challenges attempting to overturn Roe and Casey quite regularly when they were in effect- what’s one trying to overturn obergefell?
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I distinctly remember seeing a twitter thread in which a gay relationship advisor (that's bracketed (g (r a)), not ((g r) a), mind you ;) ) wrote that the religious were right, it was a slippery slope, and it's a good thing that it was. @TracingWoodgrains, help me out, I remember you conversing with that guy.
https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/no-josh-weed-our-gay-marriages-will-not-destroy-their-traditional-ones-345b2d0147e7
Josh Weed?
Yeah, that one
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You included a bracket smiley in your bracketed explanation of the bracketing.
My hat is off to you.
I always struggle to decide whether to add a corresponding parenthesis or not, when I do that. (That is, whether I should do it like he did it, or like this :).
You did it the right way before. This time it looks like you have extraneous punctuation.
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Finding older commentary on socially-controversial subjects is hard at the best of times, and we're not in the best of times. Mainstream debate focused on bestiality, polygamy, and child abuse, in no small part because they were easy strawmen for each side to target; the role of each gender within the family was a major part of intellectual religious conversations and is... basically invisible from the internet now.
Transgender politics wasn't in the mainstream awareness yet as of 2012, but it had at least bubbled to political awareness in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act's Section 1557, and the ENDA/GENDA debates.
There were also more general arguments about a slippery slope to some unknown problem that are more readily available, though I understand the concern about this being so wide a prediction as to be meaningless.
((That said, I'll reiterate my general disagreement with somedude and walterodim's claim; the transgender movement long predates the acceptance of gay marriage or even Lawrence v Texas, and it's very far from clear that Obergefell had anywhere as big an impact for normalization of transgender stuff or for the political sphere as any of a thousand other things.))
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We exist on an offshoot of an offshoot of the comments section of a psychiatry blogger who has openly practiced polyamory, and frequently discuss people like Aella, who promote sexual relations with multiple partners as an enlightened and superior alternative to monogamy. These discussions have been had here as recently as a few days ago.
Polyamory is also, as far as I can tell from my experience in it, rapidly becoming normalized in what's left of the atheist movement and the broader "nerdy woke people" subculture. Heck, my mom is an HR director in my conservative hometown, and lately had a job applicant who spoke openly about their poly lifestyle (they didn't get the job, mostly because they seemed legitimately crazy). This stuff is widespread, and I think it's more common in queer dating than straight dating. This is a slippery slope coming from the same people: gay people and nerdy woke people.
Maybe the slippery slope isn't leading to polygamy right now, exactly. But it has been, and is, pretty clearly leading to the normalization of polyamory. I think polyamory is more difficult to translate into the existing legal framework around marriage than gay marriage was. But if it weren't, I would be under no pretensions that Scott, and Aella, and Ozy (was he dating them at the same time?), and all the rest of the crew wouldn't be arguing their hearts out that recognizing plural marriages is a human rights issue (TM). As far as I'm concerned, it's just a matter of time.
Okay, I really thought about including this as an aside, because it was a much closer prediction. I agree that polyamory has gotten much closer to the mainstream. It is a bit weird that it’s done so without getting any traction in, say, divorce law.
Regardless, the OP is not regretting support for gay marriage because the religious were right about polyamory. I’m arguing that current trans issues are poor evidence for this slippery slope model, since they were neither predicted in the model nor obviously caused by gay marriage.
Is it true that gay activists, with their goal achieved, moved on to other progressive causes? Sure. Was keeping them occupied the reason people were intent on “defending marriage”? I don’t think so.
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