Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/298224
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 20 APRIL 2014 Opinion 20 I have heard it said that history repeats itself. But does it have to keep banging on about the same old issues indefinitely? It is starting to sound like a cantankerous old bore. Take the introduction of civil unions, for instance – in particular, the legal recognition of same-sex couples with the inevitable consequence that these have now been accorded the same rights as their heterosexual equivalents. On this score, history seems to have dug deep into its repertoire to produce all the usual logical fallacies, in roughly the same order, as we see each time an issue rears its head to trouble the morally unimpeachable amongst us. But because there is now a political motive to discredit the civil unions bill (on top of all the usual moral outrage and indignation, etc.), these same fallacies have been dusted down to make them slightly more palatable to people who would otherwise dismiss such arguments for the illogical tripe they really are. But common to all these varieties is a single premise that goes something like: It's unnatural. And in most cases it will just stop there: as if, having determined something to be 'unnatural ', no further argument is even required. OK, leaving aside the tiny detail that this premise is simply untrue – homosexualit y is not unnatural at all, but I' ll come to this later – there are two varieties of this particular fallacy in current circulation at the moment. The first – probably more widespread – concerns homosexualit y as a whole. It is 'unnatural ', we are told, for same-sex couples to even exist, let alone to raise children. People who reason like this do not limit their outrage to same- sex adoptions, by the way. They oppose the civil union bill in its totalit y, usually on the following, patently f lawed grounds. Nature, they argue, expects children to be raised by a mother and a father, otherwise nature would have made it possible for same-sex couples to have children naturally. And because two people can only come to live together for the sole purpose of bringing children into the world – another fallacy unto itself, but let's bear with it for a while – there can be no justification for either the existence of homosexualit y as an orientation, or even less for a law that gives recognition and rights to same- sex couples. Inherent throughout all this is the rationale that we simply must all bow our heads to whatever nature thinks or does, in all things, every where. Small problem. Even if the premise were true, and homosexualit y really were unnatural, the same conditions would also have to apply to practically everything else humanit y has ever cooked up or concocted in its measly little two- hundred thousand year career as a species inhabiting planet Earth. Motorised transport, for instance, is unnatural. Otherwise, nature would have endowed all living things with wheels and their own internal combustion engines. So if you plan on driving to work tomorrow, please note that you will be committing a gravely unnatural act. You will be perverting the natural order by indulging in activities that are not contemplated any where in Mother Nature and we all know what happens when Mother Nature is defied. It's driving to work tomorrow, abortion the day after, and the re-introduction of human sacrifice the middle of next week. Even the fact that you have a place of work to drive to, by the way, is something that lies entirely outside the natural world. Look at the lilies of the field, as a certain someone once said. They neither toil nor spin. And look at the birds of the air, too… at least, the ones that haven't been blasted to smithereens. They neither reap, nor sow, nor even gather into barns. Does it follow from this observation that toiling, spinning, reaping, sowing and gathering – in a word, work – are suddenly big no-nos? That because lilies and sparrows can get by comfortably without such nuisances as contractual agreements with employers, or social securit y contributions, then everybody else should do the same? Does it also mean that reaping and sowing – i.e., the cultivation of food to eat through agriculture; another unnatural invention if there ever was one – is to be prohibited as an affront to nature? I don't think so. Otherwise, where would that same certain somebody have found a piece of bread to break, two thousand years ago last Friday? He would have had other problems too. Religion, after all, is another human invention that has no place any where else in nature. Certainly no comparable phenomenon exists in the animal kingdom, outside of man. And I think we can safely exclude plants and bacteria, too. Of all the countless animal species to have emerged and gone extinct on this planet, only one – humankind – has ever developed the facult y of believing in such concepts as all-powerful deities, an invisible and immortal soul, the afterlife and Universal Judgment. The rest of the natural world has spent the better part of the past four billion years without such fanciful notions, and looks none the worse for it as far as I can see. Certainly no other animal apart from man slaughters its own kind mindlessly in the name of its own version of the same unnatural invention. No other animal performs absurd rituals on its newborn offspring, and then bases its treatment of other individual specimens on whether they went through the same rituals themselves. Above all, no other animal apart from man bases its judgment of others on what they may have read somewhere in a book, be it the Bible or the Koran (which, on this issue, are prett y much identical), or any other canonical sacred text. There are good reasons for non-human animals to avoid this sort of behaviour, by the way. It involves other deeply unnatural (and therefore abhorrent) behaviour patterns such as reading and writing. These, too, are uniquely human inventions which have no natural equivalents any where else, unless, that is, you count the scent-marking of territory, which does leave 'messages' to be 'read ' by others, usually in the form of urine sprayed against a tree. Apply the same logic here and you will reduce humanit y's most seminal intellectual achievement – the invention of a spoken and written language and all that has accrued as a result, including the aforementioned Bible and Koran – to the equivalent of a dog cocking its leg against a lamp-post. This is what happens when you allow Nature to determine the laws that govern man. You automatically undo some five thousand years of human civilisation and turn the calendar of evolution back to when humans were scarcely distinguishable from the animals he hunted. This brings us to the second (and even more contrived) version of the same argument. The one in current use among people who would, under ordinary circumstances, both champion equal rights and welcome such developments as a civil union bills but who, presumably because the law came about on the initiative of the detested Labour Part y, feel they have to somehow find a reason to disagree. In this scenario, the argument is slightly different. Homosexualit y does exist in nature, they concede. Homosexuals should be permitted to exist – yes, terribly generous of them, I know – but Raphael Vassallo 'It's unnatural', said illogical It is 'unnatural', we are told, for same-sex couples to even exist, let alone raise children