As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the NAACP board voted almost unanimously to support marriage equality for gays and lesbians recently. And as I’m sure you won’t find surprising, MLK Jr’s wingnut niece, Alveda King, has responded with nothing but logical fallacies.
“Neither my great-grandfather, an NAACP founder, my grandfather Dr. Martin Luther King Sr., an NAACP leader, my father Rev. A. D. Williams King, nor my uncle Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda,” says King, founder of King for America and Pastoral Associate for Priests for Life.
“In the 21st century, the anti-traditional marriage community is in league with the anti-life community, and together with the NAACP and other sympathizers, they are seeking a world where homosexual marriage and abortion will supposedly set the captives free.”
There are two arguments here, both of them logical fallacies. The first is not only an appeal to authority, it’s an appeal to inherited authority. Even if such arguments were valid, this one is easily countered by pointing to Coretta Scott King, the wife of MLK, who was a staunch advocate of full equality. Or to MLK himself, who supported gay rights. You don’t get to claim some sort of familial authority to give you moral credibility on this one.
The second is a fallacy of association, arguing that since the same people who support gay rights also support the right to choose, which she considers evil, then if one is wrong so is the other. This is obviously absurd. It also feeds the first fallacy, since MLK Jr. was given an award by Planned Parenthood and spoke of the importance of Margaret Sanger and family planning.
And notice that there isn’t even an attempt to make a substantive argument. She doesn’t even state a claim for why marriage equality is bad, why gays and lesbians don’t deserve the same rights and equality that her family has always fought for (until her, of course). She has no valid argument to make. That’s why she has to offer fallacious ones instead.
9 comments
2 pings
Skip to comment form ↓
hexidecima
May 25, 2012 at 11:21 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sad to see that people who fought for freedom are so willing, nay insistent, to deny it to others. It seems that religion is indeed a poison and that Alveda is just as nasty as any Klansman who thought she should remain a slave, all due to the delusion that they are better than anyone else beause they have some “god” on their side.
gshelley
May 25, 2012 at 11:36 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And claiming that people who support SSM are “anti-traditional marriage” could probably count as a straw man. Or some fallacy
harold
May 25, 2012 at 11:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Please re-read the article.
d cwilson
May 25, 2012 at 12:16 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m starting to wonder if Alveda King had ever spoken to her uncle. She doesn’t seem to know anything about him.
But even if her uncle, her father, her grand-father, her great-grandfather, and her seventh cousin’s college roommate’s hairdresser all opposed same sex marriage, so what? Jefferson had a lot of great ideas for running a republic, but he was dead wrong on the issue of slavery. One doesn’t preclude the other.
The Lorax
May 25, 2012 at 12:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The comments on that article are amazing… lots of… RANDOM CAPSlock STATEMENTS … and OMGWTFGOD .. pauses.. and references to an ancient book 2:13
*shivers*
Sorry, that took a lot out of me. Seriously though, if that’s the best they can do, then it’s just a matter of time.
fastlane
May 25, 2012 at 1:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So is that pretty much her schtick…lots of name dropping then spout random incoherent bigoted nonsense? (Rhetorical question.)
I’m so glad we are seeing the downslide of the anti-gay movement. I suspect we will have reached the tipping point shortly where the laws finally start following public opinion that has already seemingly passed the tipping point.
Michael Heath
May 25, 2012 at 1:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
hexidecima writes:
Where we can point to the evolution of both Baptists and Catholics in the U.S. to both illustrate but more importantly validate this argument. Both sets of congregants were denied equal liberty rights at our founding and for Catholics, long after. But once secured, both groups have become primary opponents to the same level of protection of rights they now enjoy.
Jordan Genso
May 25, 2012 at 2:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It seems to me that the conservatives have decided to give up trying to make arguments based on anything other than labeling the other side as wrong. If you label the other side “anti-life” and “anti-traditional marriage”, those labels substitute for actual thinking.
I got into a discussion with someone who was trying to claim that the President’s budget was voted down in the House and Senate without a single Democratic legislator voting in favor of it. A simple search revealed that what was actually voted down was a budget proposal written by a Republican, and the Republican referred to the budget as President Obama’s. Simply by calling it “the President’s budget” makes it so (in their opinion), regardless of the fact that the President didn’t write/propose it.
I think they’re conceding that they aren’t going to attempt winning over rational voters, and they’re just betting that they can capture a large enough percentage of the irrational ones to keep them in power.
Azkyroth, Former Growing Toaster Oven
May 27, 2012 at 12:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m very surprised. I was promised sputtering and gesticulating.
ltheanine benefits
May 28, 2012 at 12:21 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
ltheanine benefits…
[...]Alveda King’s Irrational Response to the NAACP | Dispatches from the Culture Wars[...]…
The Monster of Monticello - Page 2
December 3, 2012 at 12:19 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
[...] His niece has been bought and sold. She is homophobic, and conservative (read: Republican). Alveda King’s Irrational Response to the NAACP | Dispatches from the Culture Wars Like I posted, Rev. Joseph Lowery, who knew MLK better than most, and being his close trusted aide [...]