The slippery staircase, and other mixed metaphors

So, Ed Whelan, a conservative man who runs the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the following in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act:

If the male-female nature of traditional marriage can be dismissed as an artifact and its inherent link to procreation denied, then surely the distinction between a marriage of two persons and a marriage of three or more is all the more arbitrary and irrational.

Whose side are you on here, Ed? Because you’re making all our points for us here. The distinction is arbitrary and irrational, and should be considered in those terms.

The key difference in our thinking here is that all of these things you see as horrifying, we see as liberating, necessary, logical. This is a fundamental disconnect - you are even able to see our line of reasoning, but you then stand that reasoning up as ‘obviously bad’, without bothering to explain why you think it is bad.

And that’s because there is no reason (that is, based in logic) for your belief; it is entirely emotional, founded on values you unquestioningly assimilated and never once stopped to analyze on the basis of whether they actually improve the lives of either individuals or communities.

Or, to quote professor of Law William Jacobson:

The polyamory slippery slope argument was met with derision precisely because it raised a legitimate point….

Yeah. That.