PRESS RELEASE: With the country roughly evenly divided on same-sex marriage, the issue is a flashpoint in the November election. President Obama has endorsed marriage equality, the Democratic Party has included it as part of its national platform, and voters in four states (ME, MD, MN, and WA) will consider ballot initiatives on the issue. Meanwhile, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is mobilizing to defeat these initiatives and roll back marriage rights in other states.
Professor John Corvino is intimately familiar with NOM’s arguments, having just published a book with NOM’s co-founder Maggie Gallagher. In the book, Debating Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012) he dismantles Gallagher’s position and makes a powerful case for marriage equality. Now, in a new series of nine short videos, he distills the arguments down to their core elements and makes them accessible to a wider audience. The videos are about 3 minutes long each, with a total running time of under a half hour.
Displaying Corvino’s trademark combination of logical precision, sensitivity and humor, the videos offer powerful rebuttals to familiar objections, such as “If gay marriage, why not polygamy?” and “Marriage by definition requires a man and a woman.” While dismantling the arguments one by one, Corvino also sets the stage for a more positive dialogue.
Corvino, also known as “The Gay Moralist” (for his longtime column of the same name), is chair of the Philosophy Department at Wayne State University in Detroit. He has spoken at over 200 university campuses on ethics, sexuality, and marriage. “My goal is to promote a more thoughtful conversation on these issues,” he says. “Moral concerns should be conversation-starters, not conversation-stoppers.”
These videos continue that conversation respectfully yet forcefully. Find them here.