Sticking it to the slippery slope

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick counters the “slippery slope” argument against gay marriage (“Slippery Slop“). An excerpt:

Sen. Rick Santorum got into hot water for spewing this argument last spring: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.” Anything, mind you. […]

The real problem is that there are really only three arguments against gay marriage: One is rooted in entirely God’s preferences–which have little bearing on Equal Protection or Due Process doctrine, as far as I can tell. The second cites inconclusive research on its negative effects on children. The backup is the slippery slope jeremiad, which seems to pass for a legal argument, at least on cable TV. But fear of the slippery slope alone is not a sufficient justification for doing the wrong thing in any individual case. In a superb dialogue on gay marriage in Slate, Andrew Sullivan, responding to David Frum, makes this point eloquently: “The precise challenge for morally serious people is to make rational distinctions between what is arbitrary and what is essential in important social institutions. […] If you want to argue that a lifetime of loving, faithful commitment between two women is equivalent to incest or child abuse, then please argue it. It would make for fascinating reading. But spare us this bizarre point that no new line can be drawn in access to marriage–or else everything is up for grabs and, before we know where we are, men will be marrying their dogs.”