There are few topics that raise the collective temperatures of Americans on all sides as much as gun control and gay marriage. At first blush, it seems like the two debates are separate, without much to connect them. I mean, shooting people and marrying people are pretty different things. So it would take a real master of rhetoric to combine the two in one astounding argument.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet U.S. Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas, duh), member of the newly minted Tea Party Unity organization.
While discussing gun control in a recent conference call, a questioner addressed the idea that the number of rounds in a magazine should be limited to, say, 10, because, fun fact, you can kill and maim an awful lot of people in a very short amount of time when you don’t have to stop and reload.
Gohmert responded, “Well, once you make it 10, then why would you draw the line at 10? What’s wrong with nine? Or 11? And the problem is once you draw that limit. It’s kind of like marriage when you say it’s not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man or why not somebody who has a love for an animal?”
Yes, indeed it is “kind of like marriage” if you equate vowing to spend the rest of your life with someone and being legally recognized as a family with a large capacity magazine being emptied out into the bodies of people in order to kill them. And if Gohmert doesn’t see the difference between those two things, then I think he and his wife should really get some counseling, quick.
Of course, Gohmert isn’t content to just make a comparison between gun control and marriage control, he’s got to bring polygamy and bestiality into it, too, to show off his command of the slippery-slope argumentative fallacy, a favorite among antigay conservatives. Because if two women can get married, then why not three men and four wives and six goats and a partridge in a pear tree? You can’t argue with — or follow, for that matter — logic like that.
Gohmert continued, “There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage and it’s the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used. Then it’s just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal.”
Got that? Lines are hard and confusing! And in Gohmert’s world are apparently all drawn in chalk in the middle of a rainstorm. He seems to be forgetting that humans draw lines all of the time and, for the most part, all hell does not break loose. Take speed limits, for example. States set the limits, we follow them and if we don’t, we can get pulled over and given a ticket. Speed limits also have changed over time, which is why Sammy Hagar’s “I Can’t Drive 55,” a cutting-edge lament in 1984, is but a rock-and-roll relic today.
So, you see? “Lines” (also known as laws) such as these are drawn and redrawn over time and the process does not involve humans having sex with animals of any kind. Unless, of course, they do things differently in Gohmert’s district in Texas.
D’Anne Witkowski has been gay for pay since 2003. She’s a freelance writer and poet (believe it!). When she’s not taking on the creeps of the world, she reviews rock ’n’ roll shows in Detroit with her twin sister.